Merchandise Planning: Putting The Power Of Information To Work

Adding products and product lines to keep pace with its customers' insatiable appetite for holiday-inspired items, Current, Inc. has grown to become America's largest direct-mail marketer of paper products, gifts and home decorating items. However, during its early growth, the company struggled to match inventory with customer demand, resulting in lost sales, inventory overstocks and back orders.

By implementing a solution that included Direct Tech's Forecast*21:Direct, MAPS and Visual Merchandising, Current, Inc. is better able to manage its inventory, its internal processes and its catalog production to increase sales – and customer satisfaction.

At Current, Inc., business is driven primarily by the major holidays. This creates only a brief window of opportunity to sell its seasonally inspired paper products, gifts and home décor items. However, the rapid pace of business and inability to efficiently access prior sales information, made it difficult to anticipate the demand for products or to ensure the availability of product in its inventory.

In addition, internal resources were not able to work together as effectively as they needed to. Forecasting and merchandising were not only on separate floors, they operated at different ends of the spectrum. What's more, the system that was designed to provide decision-making data was not very flexible or timely. It required nightly downloads, offline analysis and delays in catalog production schedules.

Current, Inc. needed a tool that would allow better forecasting and inventory management, increase accessibility of key decision-making data and more effectively use selling space in catalogs to drive sales more profitably. After using an inventory tool created in-house, Current, Inc. felt the time was right to implement Direct Tech's Forecast*21:Direct in its operation.