03 - Assortment Planning
03 - Assortment Planning
Assortment Planning
Assortment Planning
The Merchandise Category Structure
Introducing Category Management
Increasingly diverse customer requirements, fierce competition, and a rapidly
changing market are forcing retailers to drastically rethink their assortment strat-
egies. Retailers must constantly reexamine assortments from different perspec-
tives, as well as their position in the market based on local factors and different
customer groups.
Policy decisions such as these can only be taken if the person responsible for an
assortment is allowed the right view on information relating to it: The right view
is one that cuts across all the individual processes along the length of the value
chain, allowing a “whole-category” approach to managing the assortment.
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any level of detail for the analyses, down to merchandise category level or in
individual cases, to article level. These reporting tools can provide answers to
questions such as:
m Which customer groups buy which articles?
m Which articles are usually purchased together?
m How many articles were sold between 4 pm and 5 pm in store n?
You can use exception analyses to filter out unwanted information, as this type
of reporting alerts the Category Manager to exceptional situations. The Catego-
ry Manager also specifies the nature of the exceptions that are reported.
Demo Data Helps You The Category Manager Workbench is structured differently in every company.
Understand the One example of the way it can be structured, based on the IDES model company,
is provided with your system. This example comes complete with process-orient-
CMW More Quickly
ed demo data, at merchandise category level, or for departments defined as cost
centers.
Merchandise Categories SAP Retail supports a merchandise category hierarchy throughout the article life
Make Life Simpler cycle—from when an article is created to when it is sold and evaluated.
When you create a merchandise category, you define a set of common data for its
articles. When a new article is created, this data is displayed as a default. Each
merchandise category also has certain characteristics, which you define yourself
or which are inherited from a higher level in the hierarchy. These characteristics
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The system runs certain standard checks (to which you can add your own criteria)
before reclassifying any objects.
One of the standard reclassification checks, for example, ensures that an article is
always assigned to a merchandise category immediately above it in the hierarchy
and never directly to a high-level merchandise category. Checks like these ensure
that the hierarchy remains consistent whatever changes you make to it.
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Flexible Components also To keep the process of maintaining assortments as flexible as possible, SAP Retail
Support Apparel Styles provides an array of different types of assortment module for you to choose from.
Whichever type of module you choose, you can enter both single and generic
articles (master styles) as the module items, or list individual variants (styles) of a
generic article. If you simply specify a generic article, all its variants will be auto-
matically included in the module too. If you attempt to list a variant on its own,
the system checks first to make sure that it has not already been listed in the mod-
ule as part of its generic article. This also applies to structured articles (prepacks,
sets, displays) and their components.
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The system compiles each assortment list from listing data, taking assortment list
cycles into account. You can group articles according to assortment list type, a
parameter that you use to define two cycles:
q The intervals at which the system generates new full versions of the assort-
ment list (containing all articles in the assortment)
q The number of change versions (containing those articles where data has
changed since the last assortment list) that can be generated before a new full
version is required.
To make things easier for your stores, the articles are arranged in the assortment
list by department, layout, layout module, and article sequence number. This should
correspond to the physical layout of the articles in-store. When you are ready to
send the list, you can choose between generating a printout for your store or send-
ing the list as an electronic message.
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You achieve this by assigning vendors and stores to supply regions. If a store
attempts to order from a vendor that is not assigned to its region, the system is-
sues a message warning you of the mismatch.
You can also make supply regions a factor in automatic vendor selection.
How does data defaulted from the vendor master help me maintain an article?
When you maintain purchasing data in an article master record, certain data is Defaults Simplify Article
automatically defaulted from the vendor master record. This data can include the Maintenance
purchasing group, the planned delivery time, or the units that the article can be
measured in. It can be defined at central vendor master level or at purchasing
organization, vendor subrange, or site level for that vendor.
This means that you can always ensure that the appropriate purchasing group
orders merchandise. For example, the articles in the vendor subrange adhesives
can be ordered by a different purchasing group than the articles in the detergents
vendor subrange.
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Even when you have powerful reporting tools, it makes sense to keep the number
of articles in your system manageable. SAP Retail helps you discontinue mer-
chandise that you no longer need. You do not need to remember exactly which
articles are due for discontinuation. SAP Retail finds candidates for you by recog-
nizing articles that have not been used for a long time. A few final checks are
carried out and the article is archived.
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Customize Your The SAP Retail article master has other user-friendly features too. It gives you an
Article Master overview of all the data in an article master record in a form that suits you. You
can lay out your article master screen to your own specifications. You can turn off
fields that you do not need and group fields together to meet your own special
requirements.
What are tickets and additionals and why should I use them?
You assign additionals to an article to increase the effectiveness of its presentation
to your customers. Additionals is an umbrella term used in SAP Retail to describe
tickets or price labels, care labels, security tags, swing tickets, clothes hangers, and
services such as arranging clothing for display on hangers.
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Each additional has its own master record and its data can be transmitted elec-
tronically. You can define events that automatically cause the system to generate
the additional (for example, goods receipt).
You can attach gum tabs and swing tickets. You can have special packaging made Brand Management
with private labels that have your company’s image or that indicate which mer-
chandise category the merchandise belongs to in the distribution chain.
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Just-In-Time Ticketing Once the purchase order has been created and sent to the vendor, production can
begin. Using the information you have provided in the purchase order about the
additional, the vendor requests a quotation from a printer, who then negotiates
the details of the order with your vendor. Once printed, the additionals are sent to
your vendor, who affixes them to your merchandise for you.
Pricing
The Pricing component is a dual-purpose tool that can calculate both retail-sector
sales prices (for distribution chains and stores) and wholesale-sector prices (for
distribution chains and price lists) for you. You can specify the parameters on the
basis of which you want the system to calculate the prices of new articles. These
parameters can include the basic purchase price (cost) of the merchandise (the
vendor’s base price or the distribution center’s transfer price) and a planned
markup, as specified by you.
Pricing Your Merchandise The Pricing component is flexible enough to accommodate considerations (such
According to What the as competition in your market segment) that affect the margin that you can define
and the profit you can expect to make on your merchandise. If the cost of an article
Market will Bear
changes, Pricing allows you to choose whether the margin should stay the same
(resulting in an adjusted retail price) or whether to sell the merchandise at the
same price as before (with adjusted margins).
Pricing reflects the stresses placed on the traditional value chain, where costs spi-
ral with each new link in the chain. Efficient Consumer Response methods, such
as meeting regional needs and optimizing logistics processes, help to reduce the
merchandise costs that affect your sales price calculations.
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later) in the article master. You can call up a list of all the promotional merchandise
assigned to a store or distribution center, or a list of all the sites that are allowed to
stock a particular article. The system displays a variety of data for each article,
including prices, margins, and a number of processing status levels (an overall
processing status, a listing status, and promotion announcement status).
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fields with default data taken from the customer master. This data is also used in
the Financial Accounting component. Storing customer data in one place and shar-
ing it between applications saves you time and effort. You never have to enter the
same master data twice. If the address of one of your customers changes, you only
need to make the change in one place in your system.
Can I also get statistics on my consumers long after sales data was posted?
The Information System contains statistics passed on from the Billing component.
You can also have the info structures updated directly in the Information System
by data received at the point-of-sale interface (inbound). Sales data can be trans-
mitted to SAP Retail at two different levels of detail:
q Basket analysis
Every single sales transaction is communicated to SAP Retail, complete with
full details. This option allows you to analyze the details of all your individual
sales transactions. This might be appropriate if you wish to analyze the spend-
ing patterns of your customers in order to be able to award loyalty bonuses,
for example.
q Aggregated to the level of the number of articles sold per store
You choose this option if you do not need detailed information on all sales
transactions to be transmitted to SAP Retail.
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