Retailers will get a leg up in merchandise planning with the recent launch of the SAP Merchandise Planning for Retail application, designed to help retailers simplify both top-down and bottom-up planning across multiple channels for improved sales, margins and inventory.
“With increasingly connected consumers and heightened retail expectations, retailers need integrated, multichannel planning processes to keep up with changes in the marketplace,” said Lori Mitchell-Keller, general manager, global consumer industries, SAP.
In conjunction with the new software release, SAP also announced updates to the SAP Assortment Planning for Retail application, created to help retailers localise product assortments. This updated version also simplifies planning and increases flexibility for vertical fashion companies where assortment optimisation features will help retailers decide which products to keep, which to drop and where to sell them.
Both retail applications run on SAP Customer Activity Repository, a unified data planning, predictive and analytics platform powered by SAP HANA. The repository allows retailers to perform customer-centric, multichannel merchandise and assortment planning. It also provides speed and consistency across planning applications, enabling efficient planning for large data volumes as well as real-time clustering of stores.
The applications were featured at the NRF 105th annual convention and expo, held this week in New York City.
SAP modernises grocery chain for connected millennials
The SAP Customer Activity Repository in combination with SAP hybris solutions is helping Texas-based Brookshire Grocery Company transform its business by embedding customer data into key business processes, using purchase history and real-time communications to modernise customer transactions in its more than 150 stores.
“By 2020, it is projected that millennials will go from 5 per cent of the buying power to close to 20 per cent of buying power,” said John D’Anna, senior vice president and CIO, Brookshire Grocery Company.
The grocery chain is using the SAP applications to proactively target those millennials, gathering accurate, consistent and actionable information to create a personalised omnichannel customer experience, including delivering personalised promotions loaded directly onto customers’ loyalty cards via mobile app. By gaining a deeper understanding of shopper behaviour, the company expects to be able to increase both sales and customer satisfaction. Next innovations include developing new mobile apps, implementing geofencing capabilities and upgrading its POS technology.
