Case Study: Enhance Your Merchandise Planning Process

By Erin Harris, Integrated Solutions For Retailers magazine

The merchandise planning process involves setting and maintaining future performance goals for sales, inventory, and other financial metrics, and tracking actual results. Planning decisions are based on historical trends and management insight into expected future changes such as number of stores, calendar shifts, business shifts, and promotional events. To gain better data visibility and a solid growth pattern, your merchandising software must drill down to granular detail while allowing you to retain your existing data. United Fashions of Texas, doing business as Melrose Stores, is a women's apparel retailer headquartered in San Antonio and operates 94 locations. To remain competitive, the retailer needed to overhaul its legacy merchandising system, which was too cumbersome and antiquated to keep up with the company's rapid growth pattern.