SSmart Merchandising

Top 5 Merchandising Solutions: Global Leaders in Enabling Accurate and Seamless Inventory Optimization

Have you ever considered the intricacies of managing a fashion brand across both retail and online realms? Juggling numerous stores across cities, gauging distinct identities, predicting demand, and maximizing sales require strategic finesse. Navigating markdowns, stock transfers, and style discontinuations is paramount. The complexity of nationwide operations, warehouses, and logistics renders manual Excel management overwhelming. Here, merchandising software steps in, boosting efficiency and accuracy.

Effective retail merchandising drives sales, enhances experiences, optimizes inventory, and fuels revenue growth. This blog will compare the top five global merchandising solutions (alphabetically): Impact Analysis, Increff, Nextail, O9, and Onebeat. Through this assessment, you’ll gain insights to select the optimal software for your business, streamlining processes and boosting profitability.

Key Capabilities of an Ideal Merchandising Solution 

A smart merchandising solution has several vital features contributing to its effectiveness and efficiency. Some essential features make it ideal:

• Demand Forecasting: Accurate demand forecasting is crucial for maintaining optimal inventory levels. A robust solution should leverage historical data, market trends, and analytics to generate precise demand forecasts.
• Inventory Optimization: The solution should enable retailers to manage inventory efficiently by recommending reorder quantities, safety stock levels, and markdown strategies. This prevents overstocking or stockouts and minimizes carrying costs.
• Assortment Planning: Effective assortment planning involves selecting the right mix of products for each store or channel. The software should help retailers analyze customer preferences, buying patterns, and local market trends to curate the ideal product mix.
• Pricing Strategy: Implementing dynamic pricing can boost competitiveness and maximize revenue. An effective solution optimizes real-time pricing by considering competitor rates, demand elasticity, and market positioning. It should also align financial goals with annual merchandise and sales plans.
• In-season Management: Monitoring sales performance during the season allows for timely adjustments. The solution should provide insights into product performance, enabling retailers to make data-driven decisions regarding replenishments, markdowns, or promotions.
• Collaborative Tools: Merchandising involves multiple stakeholders across the supply chain. A good solution should facilitate collaboration between teams, from buyers and planners to suppliers and distributors.
• Data Visualization: Clear and intuitive visualizations help merchandisers grasp insights quickly. An ideal software should offer customizable dashboards and reports that present data in an understandable manner.
• Integration Capabilities: Seamless integration with other retail systems, such as POS and ERP software, ensures smooth data flow and cohesive decision-making

Top 5 Global Merchandising Solutions

1. Impact Analytics

Impact Analytics is a leading retail merchandising solution provider. Its solution focuses on

enhancing the customer experience, helping retailers optimize and tailor product assortments to local market preferences with the help of AI. By leveraging data-driven insights, retailers can make informed decisions about product selection, pricing, and promotions. This leads to increased customer engagement, loyalty, and overall revenue growth.

Key Modules:

Demand Forecasting– Enable precise demand forecasts, covering SKUs across all hierarchy levels throughout their lifecycle.

Assortment Planning– Craft smart retail financial plans and efficient Open-to-Buy budgets with forecast integration. Boost margins and inventory turns. Enhance product attribution for optimal accuracy and ROI.

Pricing and Promotions– Eradicate errors with top-tier retail price optimization software. Utilize AI and ML-driven insights for precise pricing strategies.  

Allocation– Enhance customer-centric assortments by optimizing allocation decisions and space-aware planograms. Elevate execution with AI-driven shelf monitoring.

Business Intelligence– Achieve data-driven insights with intelligent reporting.

Enhance decision-making and improve business performance. 

Benefits:

• AI-driven assortment optimization for improved sales
• Dynamic pricing strategies to enhance competitiveness
• Personalized offerings based on customer behavior analysis
• Increase customer engagement and loyalty
• Maximize revenue through strategic pricing and promotions
• Quick deployments that reap immediate visible results

2. Increff

Increff merchandising software empowers planners, buyers, and merchandisers to make well-informed decisions across inventory management, from purchases to markdowns in both pre-season and in-season periods. With over 100 customizable, patent-pending algorithms tailored to the fashion and lifestyle industry, Increff enables sustainable and profitable growth. It also provides solutions for both omnichannel and smart merchandise planning. 

Increff’s solution covers the entire merchandising spectrum, from planning and buying to allocations. The software analyzes real demand and automates decisions, enhancing sales, profitability, and inventory efficiency while reducing costs and boosting customer satisfaction.

Key Modules:

• Planning, Buying, Future Inventory Projection & Reordering: Bring in granular data analysis in merchandise planning and buying using advanced algorithms operating multiple levels and planes of calculation. Increff empowers planners to optimize store-level inventory mix, extending to granular design-level attributes of styles
• Allocation, Replenishment, Interstore Transfer: Optimize assortment mix and distribution based on the store-style ranking algorithm for maximum sales. Ensure accurate inventory placement at the correct time in the correct location and depth, adapting to sales trends.
• Regional Utilization: Optimize inventory distribution across a multi-warehouse network to increase proximity to customers, reduce delivery time and logistics costs.
• Markdown Optimization: Improve the sales and margins by automating discounting decisions based on a first principle discounting engine, which can provide suggestions for each style at each store, specifically making it more granular, accurate and scientific.  
• Merchandise Financial Planning: Enable pre-season and in-season budget planning, aligning with KPIs like Margins, Revenue, and COGS. Achieve data-driven financial goals, optimize inventory, and enhance profitability.
• Business Intelligence: Empower every role from store manager to CEO with essential Business Intelligence dashboards. Quickly grasp business performance insights and drive better decisions all across brands and retailers.

Benefits:

• Streamline assortment planning with data-driven recommendations and smart inputs from the software
• Calculate the True Rate of Sale by automatically correcting for loss of sale due to unavailability and artificial spikes because of discounting
• Intelligent Store Style ranking to set priority for style allocation. Enhance customer satisfaction by offering the right products at the right time
• Reduce anomalies like overstocking and understocking
• Buying/ Allocation for new stores without any historical data available
• Additional recommendations, including Planogram, Price Bucket, and Style Depth, contribute to streamlined allocation processes
• Recommends store-level pullbacks using style performance and availability data for inventory optimization, correcting depth and brokenness
• Fast deployment and easy integration
• Highly customizable data model created on your data
• Real-time insights into demand patterns and trends
• Flexibility for taking Strategic/ Subjective calls for multiple modules
• Improves inventory turnover and profitability

3. Nextail

Nextail transforms retail merchandising with the help of AI. Predictive analytics offer precise customer demand forecasts, while real-time insights empower retailers to make informed choices regarding allocation, replenishment, and markdowns. This optimization reduces waste, maximizes profits, and enhances overall retail efficiency, showcasing Nextail’s prowess in elevating merchandising to new heights through agile, data-driven approaches.

Key Modules:

• Assortment Planning: Optimize sales and profit by determining ideal product assortments using AI recommendations, flexible parameters, simulations, and continuous monitoring.
• Buying and Reordering: Forecast local demand for optimal new product purchases, empowering buyers with data-driven decisions and intuitive expertise.
• First Allocation and Replenishment: Distribute precise initial SKU units to all points of sale, replenishing sold stock efficiently. Anticipate demand for optimal allocation.
• Rebalancing or Inter-Store Transfers: Move stock between stores to reduce overstocking and consolidate broken size sets
• Events and Promotions: Measure elasticities to improve and prepare promotions and recalculate demand baselines after events
• Business Intelligence: Instead of just reports, Nextail integrates actionable insights into systems for seamless execution.

Benefits:

• Hyper-local demand anticipation
• Real-time insights into demand fluctuations
• Reduce inventory holding costs and waste
• Improve stock availability and sales performance
• Enhance profitability through optimal markdown strategies
• Efficiently manage replenishments/reorders to align with customer demand
• Responsive to trends
• Advanced AI-driven insights

4. O9

O9 Solutions offers a comprehensive platform that seamlessly integrates supply chain and merchandising planning. This all-inclusive solution empowers retailers with complete operational visibility, facilitating well-informed decision-making. With the help of AI-driven analytics, O9 forecasts demand, optimizes inventory, and aligns processes, resulting in heightened efficiency and greater customer satisfaction.

Key Modules:

• Integrated Business Planning: Align decision-making across functions for streamlined operations
• Demand Forecasting: Demand forecasting and inventory optimization supported by AI. Enhance customer service levels while reducing carrying costs.
• Assortment Planning: Enhance store efficiency and sales by data-driven assortment planning, inventory allocation, and trend-based strategy implementation.
• Allocation and Replenishment Planning: Enhance profitability with efficient allocations, distributing merchandise to stores for optimal sales across product lifecycles. Adaptable, multi-tier replenishments.
• Merchandise Financial Planning: Build and manage customer-centric Merchandise Financial Plans across a global network.
• Markdown Management: Unified platform for pricing management. Swiftly adapt strategies for market changes, ensuring resilience to evolving demands.

Benefits:

• End-to-end visibility and collaboration across supply chain processes
• Accurate demand forecasts for effective inventory management
• Optimize assortment planning and allocation for improved sales
• Reduce costs through efficient supply chain decision-making
• Improve customer satisfaction through better stock availability
• O9 serves expanding businesses, adapting to evolving needs and scalability

5. Onebeat

Onebeat specializes in merchandising solutions designed to enhance retail performance through AI. Their platform offers demand forecasting, inventory optimization, and replenishment recommendations. Analyzing historical data and real-time market trends, Onebeat’s solution empowers retailers to align their inventory levels with customer demand, thereby reducing excess stock and improving turnover rates.

Key Modules:

• Demand Forecasting: AI-driven demand prediction ensures precision. Balanced Bottom-Up and Top-Down methods for consumer-centric and strategic planning
• Assortment Management: Master dynamic category management and raft store-specific assortments from real-time demand.
• Smart Replenishment and Allocation: Optimize replenishment, prevent overstock, and ensure stock availability by tracking SKU demand. Maintain real-time inventory targets and enhance inventory distribution for peak sales and ROI. 
• Inter-Store Transfers: Streamline goods movement, accounting for broken sizes, sets, seasonality, and SKU sales variations.
• Special Events: Monitor product performance per store, aiding seasonal and promotional event preparation. Algorithms optimize slow-mover liquidation and guide future planning.

Benefits:

• Accurate demand forecasting for improved inventory management
• Optimize inventory levels for better turnover rates
• Efficient replenishment strategies to meet customer demand
• Minimize excess inventory and carrying costs
• Enhance overall profitability through data-driven decisions
• Streamline retail processes through AI-driven insights

Final Thoughts

As the industry evolves, merchandising tools prove indispensable, ensuring optimized operations and heightened profitability. Embracing advanced technology empowers retailers to navigate complexity and deliver unparalleled shopping experiences, solidifying success in a dynamic market.

In modern retail, the choice of merchandising software shapes your business journey. Tailor your selection to your unique needs, scale, and goals. As retail’s dynamic landscape demands precision, the featured top five systems offer robust solutions, enhancing merchandise strategies and profitability. Remember, this investment secures your business’s future success.

5 September, 2023