Merchandise assortment and planning from IBM

The goal

Enabling the best strategy

The merchandise assortment and planning solution from IBM helps enable informed merchandising decisions based on sales history and price sensitivity. With this solution, you can strike the right balance of inventory, store location and pricing. By placing the right products in the right store at the right price, you can increase margins and overall profitability.

The advantage

Why IBM?

Our retail experience spans more than 30 years. We provide the expertise of 4,400 consultants dedicated to consumer focused industries. To help you take advantage of our industry expertise, we have developed:

• The Institute for Business Value, which develops advanced research and strategic direction for the retail industry.
• OThe IBM Retail Store Solutions group, which is focused on solving in-store business and technical challenges.

An example of our industry leadership includes innovative technology breakthroughs from inventing the barcode to helping develop standards for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID).

The benefits

The effect on my business

To achieve a significant competitive advantage, you need to make merchandising decisions based on accurate industry and customer intelligence. With the merchandise assortment and planning solution from IBM you can:

• Build merchandising programs that leverage market dynamics, trends, store sales history and consumer profiles.
• Develop successful pricing strategies by tracking customer demand, buying histories, price sensitivity and cost-of-sales.
• Enable merchandising actions and processes that are triggered by key business rules.
• Measure the success of your merchandising decisions to quickly refine your approach, as well as make short-term and long-range predictions.

The ROI

The payback

The merchandise assortment and planning solution from IBM can help:

• Maximize net profits and improve customer loyalty by understanding consumer demand at different price points and locations.
• Save money by placing products in more profitable locations, reducing the need for markdowns and clearance sales.
• Save money by reducing the need for markdowns and clearance sales.
• Improve profit margins by moving slow selling products to more appropriate locations.