Saks, Inc. selects Buyer's WorkMate®

“ITR Software continues to be a great business partner with our company. They have listened carefully to our strategic direction, and helped us integrate their Buyer's WorkMate® Software Suite into our Advanced Merchandise Tool strategy. We feel our next move into the integrated Assortment Planning function will go a long way to completing our Buyer's tool chest."

Introduction

As one of the preeminent upscale retailers in the market today, Saks, Incorporated is focused on and committed to delivering merchandise assortments that best meet the unique needs of their customer at each and every store location. In so doing, theyrecognized an opportunity to streamline the buying processes and practices supporting merchandise selection and acquisition and at the same time, ensure that the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the assortment meet each locations customer profile.

In order to fully leverage the opportunity, it would be critical to establish and deploy key technologies that would support the business processes and practices necessary to meeting the objective. Furthermore, it was essential that these tools be mobile and available to the users both in and out of the office, especially when finalizing merchandise selection and order execution in the market place.

Finding the Right Partner & Solution

Through its association with ITR Software, Saks was able to adapt and implement ITR’s Buyer’s WorkMate® Software Suite as the applicable technology.

The Buyer’s WorkMate Suite addresses all the critical elements of the business process of buying merchandise, including trend analysis, assortment planning, purchase order execution and allocation.

ITR Software’s’ experience and familiarity with Saks’ systems made them an ideal partner for the implementation and integration of the supporting software
solution. Additionally, Buyer’s WorkMate’s rich functionality and SKU level facilities uniquely matched the Saks’ critical requirements and represented the best opportunity to meet project goals and achieve a measurable return on investment.

Using the Solution to Solve the Problem

The project team charged with implementing the solution was comprised of various departmental entities within the Saks’ organization as well as the project team assigned by ITR Software. Saks’ IT Department took the overall project responsibility with participation from the Merchandise Information Office and representatives from the user community.

Given that the primary project goal was to improve location specific merchandise assortments, it was essential that a user community that included buying, planning and allocation personnel participate in the project from the very beginning.

Their insight into the business processes and practices that drive the entire
merchandise selection and procurement process guided the character of the ultimate implementation and integration of Buyer’s WorkMate software with Saks’ enterprise systems.

The first step in the implementation was to install the purchasing functionality.

WorkMate’s purchasing tools are designed to provide a pre-allocation facility to the buyer so they can ascertain that the ultimate order, whether pre-distributed or bulk meets the chain-wide requirement for new season merchandise.

" ITR Software continues to deliver superior functions within their applications to meet our business needs.

Their applications of WorkMate Purchasing, Spin, and Assortment Planning are key components of our Merchants Advance Tool Set."

Bill White
Senior Vice President, Applications
Saks, Incorporated

This capability is a tremendous assist to the buyer and the vendor in that the buyer, as well as the vendor, knows the merchandise allocation down to SKU level prior to making a purchase commitment. It also ensured that applicable trend tables used as a basis for pre-allocation matched the true merchandise requirement by location.

Applying the allocation algorithms in the market in concert with the merchandise selection process and converting the resultant assortment worksheets into real orders without re-keying significantly reduced the time lag in the process as well as eliminating the many errors associated with redundant data handling.

Additionally, through the use of an on-line vendor catalog facility within WorkMate, the buying organization is assured that the item is accurately created with the right UPC code when finalizing the order process.Using the dynamic purchasing facility went a long way towards taking the guesswork out of the buying process. Assortments now meet local consumer preferences down to the size level.

While the efficiency of the buying process has been significantly improved and administrative costs reduced, the real win is gross margin improvements due to reduced merchandise markdown and transfer costs. Once the WorkMate’s purchasing module was in full production, the project team moved on to step two of the implementation process.

Key to the WorkMate purchasing engine’s effectiveness is the analytical methodology used to feed the engine with trend curves that dictate the final assortment’s style quantities at the SKU level, by location.

SPIN, WorkMate’s multi-dimensional retail analytical model, captures all relevant trend information and through the use of its forecasting capability creates the applicable trend tables utilized in the purchasing process.

A critical element in this analysis process is the ability to understand the forecasted merchandise performance, by size, for each location. This perspective facilitates the execution of future purchasing decisions that truly reflect the customer’s needs and avoids the common mistake of fulfilling the prophecy imposed by past purchasing habits.

The final module to be implemented at Saks is the WorkMate Assortment
Planning application. Through its seamless integration to SPIN’s analytical facilities, WorkMate’s purchasing engine and to the Saks enterprise system, Assortment- Planning really becomes the glue for the entire environment.

The assortment plan adds significant value to the entire process in that it will, through its algorithms, recommend the number of styles a merchandise assortment should contain by store grade and how many units of each style the assortment should have by individual location. As you would expect, these decisions are continually balanced against the available budget for that
particular department, class, vendor, etc.

Ultimately, when the assortments are finalized, they are automatically fed to the purchasing engine for final selection, by SKU, to close the loop and finalize the commitment to the vendor.

Technology and Deployment

The systems environment supporting the Buyer’s WorkMate application includes a multi-processor server configuration running Microsoft Windows® 2000 Server, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and Microsoft Analysis Services. Additionally, an IBM Mainframe running DB2 provides server support for the WorkMate purchasing application.

When the application rollout is completed across the entire Saks organization, which includes Saks Fifth Avenue, Parisian, Proffitts and Carson Pirie Scott, the WorkMate application will be supporting approximately 1000 users from the various planning and buying offices.

Expected Business Value and Benefits

In summary, the tangible business value and benefits that will accrue to Saks, Inc. through the implementation of Buyer’s WorkMate include; a well defined and controllable business process to support the entire planning and purchasing practice, measurable improvements in assortment mix at each and every store location, which will optimize inventory investment and reduce markdowns and transfers, and the administrative costs associated with the purchase process will be greatly reduced as a result of improved data handling and data integrity.

About ITR Software

ITR Software is a leading provider of collaborative Decision Support, Assortment Planning, and Purchasing applications for the retail industry. With a reputation for innovative, quality products and services, ITR Software helps their customers achieve a significant and quantifiable return on investment through increased sales and margin productivity as a result of optimized product assortments in the store.

Please contact us at 856.309.2080, or visit our web site, www.ITRsoft.com to learn more about this exciting new approach.

Buyer’s WorkMate and SPIN are registered trademarks of IT Resources Inc. All other brand or product names are trademarks or registered marks of their respective owners.