Store B a big seller of mens away shirts. Store A could be in grade 1 for mens home shirts and grade 4 for mens away shirts; Store B could be in grade 1 for mens away shirts and grade 3 for mens home shirts. Grades can be assigned at any level of the hierarchy. Retail Assist gives you the ability to track
margin at any stage (intake, stock, sales), gives you visibility of weekly sales and stock intake figures, an optional tracking system to monitor the purchasing process and to automatically issue alerts and task lists, and provides support for multicurrency transactions. You can exchange data with Excel, and have preconfigured application programming interfaces for business intelligence solutions. The system requires that products are
designated for company, division, sector, department group and department, with further optional designations for category, subcategory, and section. The first three of these could be “Sports Retailer”, with the department group as Football/Rugby, the department as Football Kits, and the category as English League Teams, for example. There are three ways that Merret identifies
an individual product. Take, for instance, Football Club Home Shirt 2010/2011: • Department + Style + Colour + Size: Mix of text and numbers (such as 001, 234567, RED, M), which is used predominantly by the buying and merchandising departments and by the distribution centre.
• EAN (barcode): 13 digits, used in stores and the distribution centre; in both cases the EAN can be read by handheld terminals. Merret can automatically assign new products an EAN but you can designate additional barcodes for any product, for instance, if you want to be able to scan using the supplier’s barcode.
• SKU: Eight digits, as a unique sequential number generated by the system, not generally referred to by the business.
Of course, there are lookup functions in the system that allow you to select products by name, season, or attribute without reference to numeric codes. The system supports four methods of raising
a purchase order: from a worksheet, standard PO entry, an import from Excel, or on a
supplier-generated PO for autoreplenishment. All of these have to pass through an approval phase to be validated. You can also include landed elements in your cost price to gain a true margin figure on imported merchandise. If a product is unavailable for replenishment,
the system can also suggest substitutions. It also does weighting of quantities required based on demand curve smoothing techniques. And if a special promotion is planned, it can adjust quantities accordingly. The weekly sales, stock and intake (WSSI) module provides a weekly review of the aforementioned for departments, stores, and seasons. WSSIs are used to generate open-to- buy valuations (plus or minus from the available purchase budget) that take into account sales, stock and cover quantities. It, too, relies on the system’s stock and sales ledgers to assure consistency of data throughout.
Price changes
If price changes are created at the department level, you select which products are to be included from that department. But price changes can also be created at country/price zone levels. They can also be permanent, which will revalue stock immediately, or for a promotion—discount taken at point of sale. Permanent markdowns can be flagged as reprice or markdown only, with the system able to automatically track full price and markdown, stock and sales data. If you prefer, the system can automatically create suggested prices based on easy-to- maintain rules. Price changes are checked for duplicates to ensure there are no conflicts.
Distribution
centre management Management of the distribution centre supports multiple physical or logical warehouses; flexible bin definitions by zone, aisle, rack, level, slot; pick bins, bulk bins and pickable bulk bins; store-based and/or SKU picking; single or multiple SKU bin storage; carton, transfer and ratio packs and integrated ecommerce or call centre fulfilment and despatch, with stock reserved in real-time and support for wave picking.
Both the carrier and the customer are
notified of despatch via parcel-level tracking reference, using Parceline, HDNL, DPD, Parcelforce, and TNT. Returns are receipted and controlled, and the customer can be refunded on returns received. Distribution centre maintenance can be by
stock adjustment or audit, third-party sales, return to warehouse or to supplier, empty or low bins, and more.
Document production Retail Assist produces all of the documents
necessary to run the back end of the business including despatch notes and labels to carrier specifications; return notes and delivery labels—produced automatically when packing of an order is complete, with format tailored for each client; support for duplex printing to allow printing of returns policies and procedures on the reverse of the despatch note.
Help
Merret provides round-the-clock help- desk support, technical services, hardware maintenance, and disaster recovery. Users include a long list of major retailers, such as Selfridges, Harvey Nichols, Dune, Asos, La Senza, Jacques Vert, Precis, The White Company, Whistles, and White Stuff. Of course, a system is only as good as its
users make it, but if you use Retail Assist consistently, it should keep you on the straight and narrow, as well as enabling managed growth. As an example, the company was engaged by Mint Velvet last June with the brief that all IT systems, software/hardware, infrastructure and communications must go live at the beginning of October to run a fully multichannel business. Retail Assist not only provided the optimum solution and delivered a successful project, but did it in a mere three months, instead of nine.
Ernie Schell is director of Marketing Systems Analysis and consults on systems in the US and the UK. Meet him at ECMOD on stand 12.
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