Retail & Wholesale

Adaptive Planning provides retail and wholesale companies with a Corporate Performance Management system that facilitates both top-down and bottom-up planning and reporting at a variety of levels and dimensions, plus complex what-if scenarios analysis.

Planning & Reporting Challenges

The retail and wholesale industry is dynamic – constantly responding to changes in the economy. Rapidly-growing retail companies need to plan for new store openings and ramp-up. But they also need to protect profit margins in potentially weak retail sales environments. Large organizations can have thousands of employees in multiple countries, with hundreds of store locations, each having dozens of departments. Planning and reporting in this environment can involve a considerable number of people, spread across multiple geographic locations, and a large quantity of data, e.g., detailed sales history by SKU.

Retail planning is often bottom-up for the short term, typically the next four to six months, with detailed merchandise and store planning. But for the longer view, projected demand must also be considered. Companies need to plan top-down, using high-level assumptions or drivers. Management needs to be able to make top-down adjustments before committing to final forecast numbers. What’s required is a combination of bottom-up and top-down planning.

Planning and reporting is especially challenging for companies relying on spreadsheets. If each store has its own planning spreadsheet, a tremendous amount of time and effort is required to roll up and consolidate detailed data at different levels (e.g., store type, area, division, company.) Spreadsheet-based systems are slow, inaccurate, and non-collaborative, and don’t lend themselves well to version comparison. This time-intensive, error-prone and inflexible budget process can take months to complete. And there is little opportunity for management to make top-down adjustments, or for a bottom-up plan to meet top-down targets.

The Adaptive Planning Solution

Financial planning and analysis in the retail and wholesale environment, then, requires a flexible budgeting, forecasting, and reporting solution with the ability to:

• Allow senior management to set top-down merchandise and financial objectives, and provide lower-level stores and departments the ability to meet them
• Respond nimbly to constant changes in the economy
• Plan carefully for growth
• Increase visibility into detail such as payroll projections, or product SKU revenue by season

Adaptive Planning has been successful helping over 70 retail and wholesale companies streamline their planning and analysis, because it has allowed them to:

• Build models that support both detailed sales history (bottom-up) and assumption- and driver-based planning (top-down)
• Save time by instantly consolidating budgets, forecasts, and reports at the individual store, district, region and total company level
• Plan, report, and analyze at a variety of levels and dimensions – for example, in aggregate, or by new stores and same stores, large format and small format stores, etc.
• Support rapid expansion, both organic and via acquisition
• Model new store planning and ramp-up, using assumptions such as store type, store location, and seasonality, so that planners can quickly see fully-loaded P&Ls and cash flow based on store openings
• Perform complex what-if analysis based on seasonality, economic conditions, promotion cycles, the ramp up of new stores, etc.
• Manage key metrics such as sales, markdown and markup type, gross margin, etc.
• Model personnel in a variety of sophisticated ways — by job title or by name, including fixed headcount and FTEs that flex based on drivers such as sales or store count
• Use reports to perform variance analysis, including drill-down into underlying transaction detail
• Distribute report books via email for financial presentations such as board packages
• Improve accuracy and turnaround time in the planning and reporting process, and conduct frequent re-forecasting

Furthermore, Adaptive Planning’s Software as a Service (SaaS) model is a natural fit for the retail and wholesale industry, for the following reasons:

• It provides exceptional value. Adaptive Planning’s SaaS solution provides a five-year ROI of up to 650% compared to using spreadsheets, and has a total cost of ownership that’s up to 77% less than on-premise alternatives. And it’s low-risk, with the options of free trials and phased implementations.
• There is no IT involvement required. As a SaaS solution, no new hardware, software, or IT support is required for initial implementation or ongoing maintenance.
• It’s intuitive and easy to use. Adaptive Planning’s SaaS infrastructure and CPM engine save time and effort with built-in intelligence. Customers can avoid the wasted time associated with spreadsheet-based systems. And its web-based, highly-customizable, Excel-like interface is easy for all types of employees throughout a company to learn and use.

Select retail and wholesale customers include: