Merchandising and supply chain solution from IBM and SAP

The goal

Visibility to drive down costs and exceed consumer expectations

Consumer demands and market conditions are constantly shifting. Is your merchandising plan based on up-to-date, accurate customer and competitor data? Are your planning and sourcing processes fully integrated with logistics and delivery? Insights, integration and collaboration across your merchandising and supply chain ecosystem can help your company ultimately drive down inventory levels and the cost associated with placing the right products on the shelf to meet customer demand.

The advantage

Keep stock of your inventory and keep your customers

IBM and SAP have joined forces to deliver a portfolio of merchandising and supply chain solutions designed to maximize your merchandise and brand proposition. Our solutions enable your retail company to base planning on near real-time, consumer demand data and execute with a high degree of flexibility and responsiveness to dynamic changes in supply and demand.

Our portfolio of solutions supports the core enterprise business processes and helps your retail company optimize inventory, revenue and customer loyalty.

• Enhance buying, sourcing, suppliers, inventory levels, margin control and overall item management by optimizing core merchandising and supply chain decisions.
• Improve merchandise, assortment and space planning by planning and executing buying decisions with an aggregated view down to the shelf and in response to customer demand and trends.
• Optimize supply chain planning, forecasting and replenishment by using consumer demand data to provide an integrated set of order forecasts and stock movement requests which help you to get products from your supplier or distribution center to the shelf at the right time.
• Ensure transportation, warehousing, picking and the physical movement of stock are done as efficiently and accurately as possible to meet the needs of the customer at minimum additional cost to you.
• Drive sales and profitability as well as meet customer demand with full lifecycle price, and markdown management.

The benefits

Why IBM and SAP?

One of the longest standing global alliances, IBM and SAP bring together the full spectrum of best-practices offerings, research and industry experience. Together we've pooled our knowledge of the retail industry to offer a comprehensive solution to help retailers innovate and achieve success. We can help you drive enterprise transformation from strategy and design, through systems design and implementation to full lifecycle management.

The IBM and SAP solution for retail builds on more than 30 years of leadership, continuous collaboration, innovation and service to our joint clients. Our modular, relationship-based business framework is designed to deliver the highest levels of connectivity, control, integration and collaboration at every link in your value chain from employees to suppliers to customers. More than 8,000 enterprises can attest to our capabilities, which have been put to the test in over 10,000 successful installations thus far, including at IBM, where nearly 30,000 users employ SAP applications.

We have more than 700 joint SAP supply chain management implementations around the world, across the public and private sectors. IBM and SAP helped Indigo, a Canadian book retailer replace its core legacy systems to facilitate a single, consistent solution for business process management. The company now has:

• The ability to reallocate processing resources to manage seasonal peaks.
• Real-time access to accurate sales information.
• An annual reduction of more than C$150,000 in operational IT costs.
• Improved integration between online and bricks-and-mortar operations.