Merchandise management system is a mechanized information system to keep record of the inventory in a store or warehouse. Generally, 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 purchasing the merchandise, 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 buyers raised extensively. Often, buyers have few time or information and they ended up using approximations which is based on volumes to allocate 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 selling merchandise and procuring encompassing:
• Assortment planning
• Merchandise planning
• Open to buy management
• Sales processing
• Price management and revue optimization
• Inter-store transfer
There are some ways to achieve the goals through merchandise management system:
• Higher sales by enhancing inventory availability, achieving by better replenishment, forecasting and monitoring of product performance
• More flourishing promotions by ensuring inventory accessibility all over the promotion, thus developing the promotion's effectiveness.
• Improved control of buying, 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.
ETP international offers merchandise management tool for superior functionalities for one of the most important functions in the retails and distribution processes - planning. From sales planning, merchandise planning, assortment planning to options planning, the whole functionality of ETP is based on the major concept of multi-level location, merchandise hierarchies, and time, all tightly integrated.
More info: http://www.etpgroup.com/visitors/products_supply-chain.html
