Merchandising and Product Management

Enhance performance with a master data strategy

Create a consistent, integrated view of product data

Managing product information with static systems is a big expense. Multi-database-dependent processes create errors with widespread duplicate item creation. Retailers require a single referential system for their product information.

With the Merchandising and Product Management solution, retailers can have a trusted, central repository of information that synthesizes market, product, and financial data. With this level of visibility, you can accurately analyze your results and use tangible data when planning merchandising strategies.

What IBM offers

The Merchandising and Product Management solution contains integrated applications and projects in these essential retail areas. Select your highest priority projects and add others as you need them.

Merchandise Financial Planning
Collaborative planning for finance and merchandising teams to break down the overall sales and gross profit plan into successively smaller allocations. Establish sales and gross margin targets. Create a detailed merchandise assortment and allocation that supports the financial allocations.

Merchandise Performance
Monitor sales and gross profits for multiple divisions and channels. Plan for the impact of markdowns, returns, and promotions. Evaluate true merchandise performance by analyzing planned versus actual sales by division, category, or channel.

Master Product Information Management
Optimize product information management with a master data strategy and a central repository of product information. Keep product information in sync to prioritize new opportunities.

Advanced Predictive Analytics
Predictive analysis automatically lets you present product combinations that customers are most likely to buy.

Assortment Optimization
Increase variety in your assortments, localize assortments, and make tactical substitutions based on the customer that shop in your store.

Tailored Assortments
Provide consumers with the products they want, when they want them while effectively managing inventory and gross margins.

Initial Price Optimization
Build consumer demand models based on shopper purchase history to understand the underlying drivers of demand and set initial price.

Markdown Optimization
Optimize the timing and depth of markdowns by chain, zone or store location.

Promotion Price Optimization
Understand the real effects of price changes and chose the best promotional tactics to set appropriate promotional prices.

Promotional Planning and Management
Increase sales and customer satisfaction by planning and synchronizing the rollout of promotions to store and online channels.

Benefits of the Merchandising and Product Management solution

Enterprise-wide visibility of inventory, sales, and supply chain in a single, robust system.
Integrated view of product-to-customer-demand metrics.
Central repository of all aspects of product information.
Business user access of information is not dependent on IT support.
Track key financial indicators and conduct meaningful year-over-year comparisons and projections.
Reduce costs due to incorrect data in the supply chain.

Smarter retail success story – Data synchronization of a global company

Data quality was a major challenge for Carrefour, a global supermarket retailer headquartered in France. To maintain competitiveness, Carrefour needed to consolidate product information in a standardized way to increase their data quality and improve the results of data analysis. Using IBM WebSphere software products for data synchronization, Carrefour reduced costs and improved employee productivity. The benefits of high-quality data also affect other areas such as customer service, customer loyalty, better management of channel relationships, and increased collaboration with suppliers.

IBM builds the key requirements of smarter retailing into the IBM Retail Industry Framework to help you achieve your business imperatives:

Deliver a smarter shopping experience:
Increase brand equity, improve customer loyalty, and boost profits.
Build smarter operations:
Retain the best employees, increase productivity, and streamline processes.
Create smarter merchandising and supply networks:
Share information, synchronize activities, and work more efficiently.