Implementing Best Practice Planning and Analysis Solutions

Customer Profile

Wilson's Leather is the leading specialty retailer of leather outerwear, apparel and accessories in the United States. With over 700 stores across the country, the company is vertically integrated and manages the supply chain from design and manufacturing through to point of sale. The company is also one of the oldest in the USA, dating back to 1899 when it was known as the Berman Brothers Fur and Wool Trading Company.

Business Need

Wilson's Leather approached T4G to assist in providing more robust and flexible merchandising solutions to support the growing needs of the business. A key objective was to more effectively manage assortments across a diversity of selling channels, including mall stores, outlets, airport kiosks and temporary seasonal stores. Barbara Bailey-Werner, Project Manager, added "Assortment planning is critical to achieving our business goal of getting the right product to the consumer. At Wilson's Leather we start with an in-depth analysis of performance, then build the assortment plan around factors that are important to the customer such as collection and brand. In-season we need to monitor the performance of our most profitable key items to make sure we have enough inventory to meet consumer demand." The merchandising organization had experienced difficulties trying to manage assortments using spreadsheets, as these were extremely labour intensive to maintain, and prone to data inconsistencies and errors.

Solution

Wilson's Leather had purchased JDA's Arthur Suite of merchandising applications and wanted to leverage this investment to provide a solution to their needs.

As a first step, T4G conducted an evaluation of the merchandising processes to determine the key issues that Merchandising needed to address. T4G provided a series of recommendations based on the scope and priority of the business requirements that included a strategic roadmap of suggested short and long term initiatives based on the estimated business impact and return on investment.

The greatest opportunity was in information delivery. T4G worked with the Wilson's Leather project team to implement the Arthur Knowledge Base database and Performance Analysis desktop tool. This was a huge win for the organization as it freed up time for decision making and enabled merchandising executives at all levels of the business to access performance and plan data from a variety of different business perspectives. This solution was also a win for IT as the central database provided a single data repository that was easier to maintain, consistent and accurate.

T4G's next mandate was to automate the planning and forecasting of key items to enable Merchandising to respond more quickly to issues that impact inventory and sourcing. Arthur Planning is used to generate a suggested forecast based on performance trends and taking into account the impact of factors such as promotions and changes store distribution. As a result, Merchandising is more proactive in identifying problems and opportunities, and the business has realized significant savings as a result from improved inventory management.

"These initiatives have significantly increased the productivity and efficiency of our merchandising teams" says Randy Kirsch, Director of Merchandising Systems at Wilson's Leather. "T4G has a wealth of experience and knowledge in merchandising best practices. They helped us identify and execute a strategy that has resulted in a sound return on our investment in JDA's products."

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