Bringing Movie-Themed Merchandising To Life

This client’s Planning & Allocation managers developed and updated their Item Plans using Excel. Each manager used different methods, formats and metrics to develop their plans. Planning standards were hard to enforce, which led to inconsistency between plans. This made plan consolidation extremely difficult.

The client needed a tool that would allow them to plan key items by attribute groups and by individual item. These key items would also need to follow different markdown strategies and calendar timelines.

The Challenge

The company tried to implement a packaged solution to support Item Planning. Unfortunately the package could not support their robust and flexible attribute planning needs. Planners were constrained to the packaged software’s fixed hierarchy.

In addition, numerous attribute groupings were required to organize, group, plan and report products for specialty promotions, events and product offers. Compounding the challenge was there was no systemic or consistent product attribution application.

The Approach

T4G designed and developed a custom application that exactly met their needs. It allowed the business to manage key item groupings across the company. An attribute maintenance utility enabled buyers to create and manage their own attribute lists and plan sales and promotions in a way not previously possible.

Along with the planning application, an analytics component was developed to allow for immediate and flexible reporting at both the macro and micro levels across single and compound attributes. This enabled the company to build flexible plans and visibility to plan vs actual data to react to in-season buying patterns immediately to manage markdowns and inventory across their promotionally-driven business.

The Result

The client believes that T4G’s custom retail solution was critical for executing their movie-themed store merchandising strategy.

This strategy – a key market differentiator and the companies ‘secret sauce’ – was brought to life by a specialized T4G-built Merchandise Planning application.