How come they never have my size?
How come they never have my size? The more often you hear that question, the worse your margins are.
Let’s say you own a major fashion brand. You’ve outsourced your manufacturing and your supply chain is lean and mean. So, how do you improve margins?
You know that customers are willing to pay a premium for your brand. But they’ll only pay the premium if you can get the right items to the right stores at the right time. With life cycles of six weeks or less and a new collection appearing every couple of weeks or so, it’s an increasingly urgent question.
The first step is to open a flagship store. Frankly, that’s the easy part. It’s much more difficult when you have to supply a number of stores, some of which you own and some of which you don’t. That’s why we developed Assortment Replenishment Planner. ARP can help you at four critical stages of the retail process:
- ARP helps you start the season by organizing which items to push to which locations. You can cluster stores by location or by size (or most any variable). ARP helps you organize your product mix for maximum impact. We call it the mix-for-max feature.
- ARP helps you organize your purchasing. You tell it what you want to sell and it tells you what you need to buy. Once you approve the plan, ARP sends the information to the rest of the Lawson M3 system to generate supply orders automatically.
- ARP helps you monitor what actually arrives from your suppliers. As you know from long experience, what arrives on your receiving dock is probably not the same as what you ordered. ARP, in conjunction with M3, monitors the flow of inbound materials and alerts you to discrepancies. You can set tolerances for what constitutes a discrepancy and what constitutes a full-fledged crisis.
- ARP helps you understand the difference between what you ordered and what you got. Then it helps you understand how to make the most out of what you got. We call this the lemons-to-lemonade feature. Once you decide on a new mix, ARP sends the information to other M3 modules to organize the shipping automatically. ARP helps you shorten the time from decision to action. (That’s a theme in Lawson software – the time from decision to action should be as short as possible).
ARP is tightly integrated into other modules of the Lawson M3 suite. So it’s easier to gather information to make decisions as well as easier to implement the decision once made. That makes you more agile and helps you respond to changes in demand more quickly. That helps simplify your life and lets you to do what you do best – whatever that may be. Want better margins? Get better software.
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