Marketing, Merchandising, Inventory Control: Gaining a Single Version of the Truth
I was sitting in a client meeting for business intelligence (BI) and dashboard planning this past week, and the Merchandising, Marketing and Inventory Control people were squaring off over why Merchandising’s results never tie back to Marketing and Inventory Control. Some of it was argumentative, but when you step back and look at it objectively, it shows why BI and executive analytics have such great promise for the retail and direct industries.
At every step in the product and promotion life cycle, these three departments’ needs are different—but at the same time they all revolve around gross demand planning and results. (By “life cycle” I’m talking about the Marketing side of planning a campaign, re-forecasting results once the initial demand is in, and then potentially re-projecting after half the campaign when the majority of sales are in.)
Merchandising’s needs are about the pre-season merchandise plan or the continual planning for the e-commerce site; the forecasting by catalog drop; and the end of the season. What quantity of each product is needed across all promotions—print, e-commerce and store?
The thing that ties these three departments’ planning and results efforts together is gross demand data. Marketing arrives at the catalog gross demand plan based on their circulation plans by drop, by house file, and by outside list segment. They also must think through all the “electronic” media in which specific products are featured—website home pages, e-mail, affiliate campaigns, etc.—and give some direction to Merchandising and Inventory Control.
Ideally, Merchandising’s catalog pre-season plans are built top-down by merchandise category, and bottom-up by product. But they should come close to tying together with Marketing’s demand plans at the demand level.
Then we have Inventory Control. It’s their job to interpret the plans and selling results and purchase product far enough in advance to be in stock when customers order. From an inventory perspective, the Inventory Control plans aren’t going to tie back to the others’ plans exactly. Management allows Inventory Control to purchase more product than the demand plans indicate, based on vendor lead time, vendor discounts offered, etc.
Week-for-week, one of the hardest things to do is read selling trends and interpret them in a way that allows you to make the right decisions—which ultimately provide the base line projections for yet other departments, such as Call Center and Fulfillment. Yet from an uninitiated perspective, it looks like a free-for-all, with many different versions of plans and results.
How can BI, dashboard and executive analytic tools help with this critical decision-making? They can provide a consistent view of all the data, so that whether they’re analyzing demand or sales, all departments are utilizing a standardized view of the same data. This allows each department to look at the segment of data that is meaningful to them. Business Intelligence solutions allow users to take cuts of the data and compare them in multiple ways, whether it be this year to last year or actual to plan, as well as to reassemble the data and analyze it from one department to another. Each department needs to maintain their own way of analyzing data, but also be able to bring their plans and results together in a consistent, uniform way.
The more we talked, the more the client’s managers got back inside their skins. And they realized how important having a single version of the truth, through BI tools and executive analytics, would be to planning and reconciling results—day-for-day, week-to-week, and throughout the year.
Brian Barry is a Senior Consultant with F. Curtis Barry & Company, a multichannel operations and fulfillment consulting firm with expertise in multichannel systems, warehouse, call center, inventory, and benchmarking; Learn more online at: http://www.fcbco.com.
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I believe Each department needs to maintain their own way of analyzing data, but also be able to bring their plans and results together in a consistent, uniform way.