QuickAssortment™

Is this another boring page for yet another retail solution? Far from it, this page is both informative and entertaining and will enrich your life in ways you thought were unimaginable!

OK, that might be stretching it a bit far, but it’s more than just your regular product blurb page, read on…

Solution Overview

Assortment Planning should be the cornerstone of creating excellent customer satisfaction.   

Seriously.   

Successful localization is to be able to consider the needs and preferences for your customers in each of your outlets, and create offerings that appeal to their lifestyles and habits.    But, at the same time, this has to be done within the overall framework of your company’s growth objectives and goals, and usually requires a level of data and detail that simply isn’t achievable with spreadsheets. 

Tricky, isn’t it? 

This is where QuickAssortmentTM thrives.  It enables a business to create a collaborative planning environment that balances; strategic goals, store plans, merchandise plans & individual item strengths and creates a structured, focused planning process that delivers value to the business at each step.  Designed exclusively for retail, QuickAssortmentTM is sophisticated yet easy to use, powerful yet efficient, intelligent yet pragmatic.  If it were your date, you would have proposed by now.    Refined over the last decade with feedback from hundreds of the most demanding of users, it is commonly considered to be the most intuitive planning application available.  

We’re proud of that.

 

The Benefits of QuickAssortment

Lower Inventory – the typical advantage most retailers experience is that they have much better visibility of the projections of where they are likely to have excess inventory positions (through poor sales or over buys), and crucially they know this in sufficient time to take action to reduce the impact.  This allows business to plan cleaner exit strategies for merchandise, without compromising margins and the brand presentation.  

Increase Sales – this is a case of putting your money where your mouth is.  Through better upfront assessment of where the opportunities are; at the store/category level for example, the business can reassign investment to support these areas and ensure that you have maximum availability in areas of greatest sales potential.  Your customers will thank you by purchasing wildly. 

Improve Turns – one of the yardsticks of inventory efficiency, and gains can be made here by planning a smoother and more detailed inventory flow.  Moving from a monthly to weekly receipt plan will highlight opportunities to time the inbound receipts to match the store need.  Similarly, advance warnings of overstock positions often provide an opportunity to cancel and reduce the average inventory overhead. 

Improve Margins – increase your sales at full price, by targeting the inventory in stores and categories that have a better propensity to sell at the full retail price.  By channelling the inventory to these stores, you’ll see a better return on the same inventory investment.  In addition, you’ll have better visibility of the overall profitability of your plans, so if desired you can invest more in areas where margins are planned to increase, and scale back from those with pressures on costs.  Either way, you win!  

Improve Productivity – this is more of a soft improvement measure than the ones above, but just as important.  With secure, valid and detailed data already loaded into the application, you’ve already reduced a huge overhead on the planning teams.  They commonly spend between 40%-55% of their time simply extracting and manipulating data, which is instantly freed up.  As a by-product, you also eliminate the risk of presenting inaccurate data.  So your teams will be more efficient and more accurate, who doesn’t want that? 

Improve Communications – the often considered mythical goal of improving communications is a snap when you are working in a single database environment.  Plans can be easily shared and compared in a secure manner, all at your fingertips.  With the addition of QuickAnlaytics™ you can create standard reports and documents that everyone is familiar with, and you can get straight on with the job of making better decisions.

Application Functionality

QuickAssortment™ is a functionally rich application with a wide variety of features and tools that dramatically improve the way the retailers can plan and run their organization.  A small subset of the features is described here for your cogitation and rumination.

General Functionality

• Flexible hierarchy definitions – define your own hierarchy levels or synchronize with your product master files.
• Unlimited alternate hierarchies – create multiple different definitions for consolidating your plans; by buyer, by region, by comp/non-comp, by business units, etc.
• Automatically create alternate hierarchies – use product level attributes e.g. color, brand, vendor etc. to create dynamic alternate hierarchies.
• The ability to define planning metrics that are unique to your planning environment, and make easy, secure changes to this as your business grows – even in a live planning season.
• A Microsoft Office 2007 style interface – using the latest Microsoft Ribbon navigation styles the user can switch easily between QuickAssortment™ and the rest of the Microsoft Office 2007 suite. 

Merchandise Planning & In-Season Re-forecasting

• A flexible approach to planning levels – define a process that is based on the level of detail that your business needs, across all hierarchies. 
• Integrated pre-season and in-season planning with multiple versions within a plan as well as multiple what-if scenarios of each version. 
• The client can create, edit and maintain their own corporate views to structure a company standard planning process, while each user can create their own personalized views that optimize the screen layouts for their particular approach. 
• The ability to ‘seed’ plans, spread numbers from a high to a low level, lock values at various levels and pro-rate the difference, consolidate from a low level of detail to a total, apply inverse calculations to elements to enable a goal-seek type approach.
• Users can even plot in specific promotions/exceptions using our event planner to identify specific uplifts or to normalize exceptional activities.  Cell notes can be added to provide the essential explanations. 

Store Planning 

• A unique store modeling utility that allows news stores to be profiled based on a like store for accelerated new store planning. 
• Flexible element definition allows for the creation of footage information to facilitate space planning and optimization. 
• Fast track creation of a detailed store plan by detailed product area (e.g. category) and blending the history, product direction, and store  development program to automatically generate a detailed initial plan.

Store Clustering & Assortment Targets

• Store clustering using intelligent store scorecarding accounting for a number of key metrics (e.g. sales $, square footage, and margin). 
• Ability to generate multiple tiers of clustering, at detailed levels of product and time.  This allows you to create assortments at the cluster level, and for these clusters to be specific to the planned contributions of the store/product combination in that period. 
• Use store attributes to affect clustering, for example climate zones, store types, store demographic classifications, etc. 
• The calculation of a target number of items to source per category per store cluster.  This gives a scientific input into the assortment  development process and frames the buying process with the output of the planning activities. 

Assortment Planning

• Create a starting point for assortment planning with targeted assortments per store cluster. 
• The what-if creation of new items and what-if modeling of potential distribution plans help to evaluate the strength and viability of each item. 
• Attach digital images to each item and review how the proposed assortment presentation looks through your customers eyes – even restrict this to the assortments presented in small or outlying stores. 
• Quantify the buy of each item, and make sure you account for increases to the number of stores an item may be going to, or an extension to the product’s lifecycle. 
• Balance the assortment across a variety of key customer purchasing criteria; color, styling details, brand, price point, etc. 
• Create an initial allocation plan based on the targeted store distribution for each item, and the ideal quantities to provide a floor fill + a forward cover quantity. 

 

Solution Architecture

TXT MAPLE LAKE is a certified Microsoft partner and our technical architecture is closely aligned to the industry leading platform provided by Microsoft.  The application utilizes Microsoft SQL Server as the core database.   

The solution uses client-server architecture with a slim client with all of the intensive data processing being run on the server to optimize performance.  Each customer environment has a unique configuration that reflects their own data structures, definitions and movements, all of which are created and managed within the application, with no custom programming required to manage this. 

For every installation source data is imported from either Merchandise Management System or a Data Warehouse.  QuickAssortment™ has flexible import builder that allows easy integration to almost any host system.

Illustrative Clients

QuickAssortment™ is widely used by retailers of varying profiles and sizes from 50 stores to 3,000, from luxury goods retailers to off-price specialists, and in locations from the US, Canada, UK and Australia. 

Clients include:
Aeropostale, Chado, Fairweather, La Senza International, Outfit, Steve Madden, Ailes, Columbia Sportswear, Garage, La Senza Girl , Pinstripe, Stockhomme, Arcadia Group , Cole Haan, Gazal, Labels, Pretty Girl Fashion Group, Stylo, Barratts, Cotton Ginny, Groupe Dynamite, Lacoste, Priceless Shoes, Top Man, Bath and Body Works, Danier Leather, Hard Rock Café, Little A, Randy River, Top Shop, Blue Illusion, Dorothy Perkins. i&F, Lululemon Athletica, Roots, Tuesday Morning, Bouclair, Dynamite, International Clothiers, Miss Selfridge, Saan, Wallis, Burton, Evans, La Senza, Mountain Equipment Co-op, Shelleys

 

 

Hopefully this exciting and informative page has helped you see that the QuickAssortment solution is sophisticated, easy to use, easy to update, and will make you more attractive to the opposite sex or gender of your choice*.

To find out more about QuickAssortment and TXT MAPLE LAKE, then simply give us a call or contact us here.  We’d love to talk to you.

*OK we can’t promise the last one.