Open to buy

Fight Retails worst enemy - unsold stock and missed sales opportunities, with the best weapon in the market, Anaplan Open-to-Buy.

The biggest investment for a fashion brand is merchandise.

For Fashion the worst scenario is that you do all this buying, distribution and marketing investment and goods remain on your shelves - then recorded as assets and eventually a loss.   On the other hand, having customers walking into your shops to find out the product they’re looking for is out of stock, will also have a negative impact on revenues and eventually customer confidence.

Making sure the sales plan ties up with production and distribution plans is essential to keep your worst enemies at bay – unsold stock and lost sales opportunities.   If you don’t consistently meet market demand by striking the right balance of stock it can damage your business before you know it.

Sitting at your headquarters in London, New York, Paris or Barbados, and trying to guess what products that little store in Hong Kong at the end of the high street will sell in 18 months’ time - and for what price, seems like an impossible task, and it often is.

Sitting at your headquarters in London, New York, Paris or Barbados, and trying to guess what products that little store in Hong Kong at the end of the high street will sell in 18 months’ time - and for what price, seems like an impossible task, and it often is.

• Are your sales plans maintained centrally or do you collaborate with all the different regions where you operate?
• Is it painful to have MS Excel files flying around in different versions from different markets?
• Do you end up with stock in certain stores while others don’t sell due to the lack of those products?
• Would you like to plan at a lower level of granularity, on a more regular basis, to get a clearer picture of how your business is doing?

Rather than a complicated forecasting software tool, with a thousand rules enclosed in a black box that no one understands, why not to consider a collaborative platform to facilitate collaboration and discussion with your colleagues in the field.

The Profit& Anaplan Open to Buy application, is designed to allow collaboration in a secured environment, and its flexibility allows you to:

• Declutter your email inbox so you can pay more attention to the communications that really matter.
• Access one version of the truth, updated in real time with inputs, imports and new calculations. You don’t need to wonder if that’s the latest version every time you’re looking into your numbers.
• Archive latest plans for reference and use them as a benchmark for future projections.
• Connect actuals, inventory and other projections in a single platform with a data connector, so that you don’t have to worry about consolidating excel files and circulating them on time.

All the angles of a sales plan can be covered by our Anaplan Open to Buy application. Anaplan’s flexibility, security and calculation power are the key to connecting sales projections to buying and orders in a way never achieved before, so that you can effectively limit unsold stock and respond to client demands consistently.