From Financial Merchandise Planning to Supply Chain Design and Execution

Abstract

For years agents believed that technology could have bridged the gap in fashion companies. This has not come true. Significant investments aimed at implementing complex systems have often failed. Indeed, they have not been able, in a simple, flexible and comprehensive way, to integrate all the processes that, by definition, are changeable and not only influenced by deterministic factors. Therefore, it proves necessary, in complex organizations, to promote those best practices and habits that support and enhance personal freedom, judgments and hypotheses. This is the process by which the retailer seeks to provide the right amount and quality of the right merchandise in the right store at the right time, while also seeking to meet the financial goals of the company. This project, developed by the collaboration between the Department of Industrial Engineering (University of Bologna) and K.Group, aims to show how financial planning of Merchandise Planning may be implemented in a major Italian Fashion Retail Company, presenting the preliminary plan to integrate it with the specific processes of Supply Chain Planning and Execution, hence highlighting achievements, methodology and technological resources in terms of: data management (normalization and load data), business intelligence (score carding, dashboards, reporting, analysis), predictive analytics (clustering, simulation), performance management (budgeting, planning and forecasting, profitability), workflow management and data integration.