Breaking News: ToolsGroup acquires Mi9 Retail Demand Management Business creating a prowerful production-to-purchase planning solution.
Better Manage Financial Plans and Open-to-Buy Budgets
Merchandise Financial Planning is a high-level approach to setting an organization’s sales, margin and inventory targets. During this step in the retail planning process, merchandise planning teams can plan their business without getting caught up in the lower-level details of the product hierarchy. With Mi9 Retail, users can plan multiple brands, channels, and currencies – all in a single view.
Additionally, the solution manages an organization’s traditional open-to-buy and offers the flexibility to choose your own planning calendar and manage strategic plan targets across any period within the time dimension. Users can make changes to merchandise financial plans at the highest and lowest levels within the defined product hierarchy.
Watch the Merchandise Financial Planning Video
Watch this short video to learn about the key features and benefits of Mi9 Merchandise Financial Planning and see it in action.
Flexible Planning Grid
Mi9 Retail offers an intuitive, strategic view of the financial plan and product hierarchy, complete with configurable metrics and units of measure to help you to manage your business. With drill-down capabilities and the ability to adjust plans at any level, Merchandise Financial Planning makes it easy to plan, track, and manage financial forecasts.
The Mi9 Retail solution comes delivered with metrics based on industry best practices. Users can easily add additional metrics by dragging and dropping them into the planning grid to configure whatever planning view they want. For those needing something more advanced, the solution offers hundreds of advanced metrics to meet the needs of even the most sophisticated organizations.
Top-Down, Middle-Out, Bottoms-Up Planning
Mi9 Financial Planning supports top-down, middle-out and bottoms-up planning, including top-down financial plans, bottoms-up category plans, store plans, as well as the ability to plan by vendor. Each planning type can be created independently allowing for different roles within the merchandising organization to create their own versions of the plan. Plans can then be compared and reconciled from the top down or bottoms up. Planners can lock and spread adjustments at any product, location, or time-level of the plan.
Intelligent Location and Category Planning
Location and Category Planning automatically balance and reconcile location and merchandise plans in order to measure category performance at a location level and generate more accurate store clusters. Location and category planning is used extensively by fast fashion and category-focused retailers in managing the allocation of products.
Superior Open-to-Buy Budgeting
No business should operate without monitoring its inventory spend within the cash flow cycle. Mi9 Merchandise Financial Planning enables you to monitor inventory investment within any period of time or any part of the product hierarchy. Having the appropriate level of visibility to your open-to-buy enables you to track the amount available to spend on additional receipts or to cut back on receipts not necessary within your organization’s merchandise plan. For ease of use, the open-to-buy capability works hand-in-hand with the strategic merchandise financial planning target setting process.
