Intelligent planning: regain control, maximize your efficiency

Consumers are already adopting recession-based shopping habits, making inventory and spend one of the most important factors for retail success this year. In fact, inventory will take on more meaning than the other metric.  

With retailers under huge pressure to clear out excess inventory and gain control of liquidity and cash, economists are warning of new financial turmoil. Profitability through better control has taken on a new urgency.  

Board is here to help. 

In this mini-series, Board will share some practical insights to help retailers get in front of an environment where sales may be a little tougher to come by.  

There are three areas of merchandising that deliver better control fast:  

1. Merchandise financial planning: Maximize profitability with integrated financial decisions 
2. Assortment: Maximize channel profitability, reduce inventory depth 
3. Open-to-buy (OTB): Optimize spend, pre-season & in-season unified decisions. 

Merchandise financial planning enables retailers to: 

• optimize sales, profit, and inventory 
• connect stakeholders with one version of the truth 
• enable better control through alignment to financial budgets  
• improve accuracy through more efficient execution at scale.  

Traditional merchandise planning solutions rarely directly fit a customer’s business planning process, leading to compromise and unsatisfactory results. Either the business process must change to align with how the software vendor considers the planning process should be undertaken, or the package requires considerable customization that increases the price and adds complexity to the solution.   

Put simply, despite all the marketing buzz about integration, merchandise planning processes are often disconnected from corporate financial planning and budgeting, which requires another level of integration. 

Breaking free from the constraints of these traditional solutions and the limitations of Excel can change the game for retailers.   

And that’s where Board comes in. 

The Board Intelligent Planning Platform empowers retailers to overcome these challenges by acting as a planning solution easily tailored to existing business processes, meeting the retailers’ needs without compromise.   

Board is the ‘one-stop shop’ for any smart and agile retailer who wants to tackle all analytics and planning needs at a fraction of the time and money they would spend elsewhere. Board covers all the planning requirements of retailers in one platform by integrating all the financial and operational data and introducing, for the first time, the possibility for users to cascade financial goals from the enterprise level down to store and SKUs.   

With cutting-edge Business Intelligence functionalities deriving information from the data, it is now also possible to forecast sales and cluster stores/customers in the same environment. All users will be part of the workflow and decision-making processes up and down the value chain, giving full transparency and alignment. 

Here is a quick overview of what Board’s merchandise financial planning solution can do.

Ready to learn more? Speak to our experts →