Retail financial planning: the power of enterprise performance management solutions
In the fast-paced world of retail, it takes more than good product selection and attractive store design to stay ahead of the competition. Today's retailers must use advanced tools and technologies to optimize operations, increase profitability and improve the overall customer experience.
Team reactivity and speed in decisions thanks to accurate forecasting is the first priority every manager should be concerned about:
- How many products x, y, z do I need for the next 3 months?
- Do I have enough stock? If not, when will I get the required amount of product?
- How can I become profitable if I open a new store? A new country? A new region?
- Would I still be profitable if energy costs increased by 5%? By 10%? Or by 25%? And what if the cost of raw materials were also affected?
One such powerful solution is Pigment, an Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) platform used by leading retailers worldwide. In this blog post, we will explore how retail planning in Pigment offers a multitude of benefits to retailers, ultimately maximizing their success in a highly competitive marketplace.
1. Accurate demand planning
Retail planning in Pigment enables retailers to accurately forecast demand by using historical data, market trends and other relevant factors. With a clear understanding of future demand, retailers can optimize their inventory levels, reduce stockouts and minimize the cost of excess inventory.
2. Optimized inventory management
By analyzing sales data and demand forecasts in Pigment, retailers can effectively optimize their inventory levels. This ensures that the right products are available at the right locations and times, leading to greater customer satisfaction and lower transportation costs.
Curious about how Revenue Planning works in Pigment? Click through here
3. Optimized assortment planning
Pigment enables retailers to effectively plan their product assortment by analyzing sales performance, customer preferences and market trends. This ensures that retailers offer the right mix of products to meet customer demand and maximize sales potential.
4. Strategic promotion planning
With Pigment, retailers can plan and execute promotional activities more effectively by analyzing historical promotions and sales data. This enables retailers to identify the most successful promotional strategies and allocate resources accordingly to maximize return on investment (ROI).
5. Efficient space planning
Pigment helps retailers optimize their store layouts and space allocation by analyzing sales data and KPIs. By planning store layouts more efficiently, retailers can improve the customer shopping experience and maximize revenue per square foot.
Integrating transaction data from different departments, such as trade promotion, sales, supply chain, procurement and finance, is essential for an End-to-End decision platform. These transactions can only provide insights if they are aggregated at an analytical level, such as channels, products, regions, distribution centers and stores. The ability to adjust these drivers at a higher aggregate level and simulate the impact of these decisions will help in making important decisions. Pigment will cascade higher-level simulation to the lowest level, such as thousands of customers and SKUs based on historical data.
