Centric

The Business Need

A Fortune 500 retailer needed to standardize their merchandise allocation process. There were five different divisions, which had five different systems and approaches, to allocating merchandise from the warehouse to the stores. The disparate approaches made it difficult to measure the results allocations decisions. Management felt that a better, more integrated approach could provide additional improvements in allocation efficiency.

The Right Skills

Centric provided technical expertise to implement a packaged system across all five divisions. Centric worked with the divisions to drive consensus on standard processes and helped coordinate and implement the system in each division. Each division required select package customization to meet individual needs, but shared core allocation processes.

A Multi-Faceted Long Term Engagement – derived benefits from this engagement include:

• A packaged system installation that improved the decision-making process for allocation
• Increased decision making data such as size-level detail makes it easier for users to affect the quality of size distributions
• Greater flexibility via multiple approaches for a single allocation
• Consistent, cross division processes
• Ability to allocate pre-packaged goods to ensure appropriate size runs and reduce shipping and handling costs

Results

The package was successfully installed at all five divisions. As a result, homogeneous business processes implemented and shared across divisions. The company was able to improve their product mix, reduce markdowns, and reduce out-of-stock situations while decreasing the warehouse costs and increasing allocation efficiency. Now each employee can handle more merchandise in a more efficient and effective manner.