The client is a leading South American specialty retailer which offers clothing, accessories and personal care products for men, women, children and babies, and operates 90 stores.
The retailer has expanded considerably in recent years. This growth pushed their ability to respond as quickly and as precisely as they once could. They were concerned that this loss of speed and certainty would punish them competitively.
As a priority, they knew they needed to improve their markdown processes. Markdown planning and execution was a highly manual, time-consuming, inflexible and error prone process that was robbing them of both productivity and profitability.
They have been using Profimetrics across the enterprise since 2006 to assist them in managing the profitability of fashion and seasonal merchandise. Once they began realising the benefits of markdowns, they moved on to using Profimetrics to plan and manage all their promotions and maintain customer friendly price architectures, the full pricing lifecycle.
The client selected Profimetrics because their frustrating and time-consuming markdown methods could not support the company’s planned growth into new and volatile markets. It was costing too much, and accomplishing too little.
In a company executive’s own words, “Markdowns are a cost. The process should be as automatic as possible to free buyers and merchandisers for tasks where there’s payback, which is where they should really be investing their time: understanding the customer, studying fashion trends, negotiating with suppliers, and monitoring competitor activities.”
After a comprehensive analysis of the markdown optimisation products in the marketplace, the company decided the Profimetrics was the best fit for their needs and could provide an integrated and complete solution to meet their requirements: one that they could understand, control and evolve, and one that users could use.
There were several key factors involved in the decision to implement Profimetrics:
• Flexibility of the solution and its ability to adapt and evolve
• Ease of use
• Ability to generate markdown offer templates based on price step reductions. These templates could be reused, reducing (and improving) planning and execution cycle times, which as a fundamental requirement for the company
• Ability to combine the clarity of performance data with human judgment
• Keeping and controlling their own data
• Understanding and controlling the markdown recommendations
The implementation was completed in just four months. During that time, using a step-by-step implementation approach, the company, working with Itim, successfully implemented Profimetrics, transformed its markdown culture and integrated the new solution with their existing systems.
As a result of implementing their new markdown management process, the company has been able to plan and execute more accurate, more effective, less costly and better-timed markdowns. The superior quality and quantity of decision-focused information that the system delivers allows the company to respond much more rapidly to new markdown opportunities and to respond to markdowns that are not performing as planned. The increase in buyer and merchandiser productivity provided by the reduction of the markdown planning and execution cycle time is now used to focus on the markdown causes, such as buying, allocating and initial price setting.
Itim
Tel: 020 7598 7700
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