Planning, Merchandising and Demand Intelligence

A huge proliferation of Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) for the consumer products has led to innumerable choices for the end customer. This has led to complication of demand and supply management, erosion of brand loyalty and increasing pressure on margins. For these reasons, ability to forecast demand accurately and having the right category mix is an important focus area for retailers.

At HCL, we work with leading retailers and offer them solutions related to improvements in merchandising operations. Managing merchandising efficiently leads to less stock outs and hence improved profitability. We have fair degree of maturity in servicing our customers in this area like advanced retail planning, retail life cycle price management, financials and HR.

Customers have become much more demanding in recent years, forcing retailers both large and small - to operate more quickly and efficiently. Thus Customer Demand Planning is one of the key areas of operations for a retailer's business. There are immense benefits in managing the demand well, prime amongst them are:

• Single Forecast – provides all departments with a common forecast to drive the retail enterprise.
• Correct Inventory – ensures proper stock levels during regular price situations and promotions to avoid lost sales due to out of stock situations. It also reduces over-stocks with correct forecasting on performance of a product or promotion.
• Improved Efficiency – streamlines the forecasting process, highlights potential problems and allows processing of large amounts of data quickly.

At HCL, we have worked closely with leading retailers in understanding their customers, sales patterns, products they sell and promotions they run. We possess rich experience in advanced retail planning, customer analytics, and promotions planning to name a few. Our solutions and services help to accurately forecast sales using advanced algorithms on the sales data, past trends and industry patterns.

Merchandise planning is one of the biggest challenges that any multi store retailer faces. Getting the right mix of product, which is store specific across your organization, is a combination of customer insight, allocation, and assortment techniques.

Our domain experts understand this and help clients in making the right forecast by SKU and ensuring that the consumer finds the right product, at the right place, right time and right price. Working closely with our technology partners, we guide our clients through the entire merchandise planning lifecycle in a systematic and integrated way. We support end-to-end merchandising functions including optimizing merchandizing assortments, allocating products, providing planning and analytics capabilities and lastly, providing solutions to maximize value from promotions and price management.

The benefits of Merchandise Planning accrued by our clients include reduced unplanned discounts and promotions, properly utilized floor space, fewer store transfers, and increased turns throughout the chain helping the bottom line immensely.

• Sourcing-Developed a Web-based system to automate complete purchasing process
• Advanced Retail Planning—Implementation of Merchandise Planning System