Cognos solutions for retail

The retail business is fiercely competitive. Retailers must satisfy customers through multiple channels, and deal with industry consolidations, increasing profit targets and shrinking margins. In this setting, the planning process needs to be collaborative and extend beyond finance to all stakeholders. It must offer value to both executive and operations management to ensure participation and buy-in across the organization.

Apply best practices technology to improve store operations performance

The IBM Cognos Store Operations Planning Performance Blueprint uses IBM Cognos 8 Planning and IBM Cognos 8 BI to provide a Web-based process for managing store operations:

• Manage store attributes and implement standards for key controllable expenses.
• Automatically calculate expenses based on revenue and company costs.
• Assess store-level impact of local initiatives such as advertising and promotions.
• Conduct headcount position-level planning based on store profiles and baseline standards.
• Model financial impact of business decisions for multiple scenarios.
• Measure key revenue, margin and expense performance indicators for operations by division, region, department or account.
• Track flash sales and labor metrics using dashboards and scorecards.
• Analyze and report on sales, labor and store initiatives to gain key insights, such as who are the top and bottom performers.

Learn more about the IBM Cognos Store Operations Planning Performance Blueprint. Download the following:

• Store Operations and Development issue paper (216KB)
• Store Operations application brief (1MB)
• Store Operations demo