Use Merchandise Management to Streamline Retail Sourcing, Buying and Merchandising
Merchandise management system is a computerized information system to keep record of the retail inventory in a store or warehouse. Generally, retail merchandise can be clustered into product lines. Thus, the merchandise management system shows the exact number of products a business has in stock at any particular time.
Merchandising traces its growth to the increase of organized retail in the world. Originally as the retailers managed one or two stores, the function of retail buying & merchandising, costing, etc was much easier.
In most of the cases, the retailer himself did it. Though, when retailer begins adding categories and stores, the work load on the retail buyers raised extensively. Often, buyers have little time or information and they ended up using approximations which is based on volumes to allocate retail merchandise among stores.
This leads to stores exchanging merchandise between them. To overcome this limitation, the function of a planner came in to being; the job of planner is to act as a mediator among the buyers and stores.
The de-linking of the functions permitted better interaction among the stores. Planners are able to spend more time to accumulate and study store level data, on other hand buyers are able to devote more time with the vendors.
Merchandise management includes all the processes for retail sourcing, retail buying and retail selling encompassing –
- Assortment planning
- Merchandise planning
- Open to buy management
- Sales processing
- Price management and revue optimization
- Inter-store transfer
Following goals can be achieved by using merchandise management system -
- Higher sales by enhancing inventory availability
- Achieving better replenishment
- Forecasting and monitoring of product performance
- Enhanced Promotion effectiveness by ensuring inventory availability
- Improved Retail Buying Control and hence inventory levels, via the use of best practice open-to-buy techniques.
- Improved margins via use of zone costing so that prices in individual stores represent the competition and demography of each store
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Merchandise management system is a computerized information system to keep record of the retail inventory in a store or warehouse. Generally, retail merchandise…