An international specialty retailer selected Cognira to lead the deployment of its Merchandise Financial Planning solution. Cognira provided the retailer with iterative deliveries and early exposure to the solution’s capabilities before the design and build phases were completed. This visibility into early prototype solutions helped prioritize which nuances and unique business needs the system needed to support. Over the duration of the project, Cognira fine-tuned the solution to the brand’s needs and helped the planning team transition to a new business process that would enable better decision-making.

Cognira designed a multi-channel implementation that included unique measure sets for different channels. For example, in the retailer’s direct sales channel, demand and shipments provide distinctive information. Also, the retailer pools inventory across channels, which required both unique views and a unique hierarchy to generate summary views of inventory at the warehouse level. Cognira was able to design and implement the retailer’s MFP solution to accommodate all of these business requirements. Best of all, the implementation and adoption of new processes under Cognira’s guidance brought all of the retailer’s business owners onto a single system, ridding them of the need to use Excel for planning.

Cognira successfully designed and installed the specialty retailer’s MFP system, which led to the following high-impact results:

• Better cross-department collaboration and improved planning efficiencies
• Enabled merchandising to drive the business using top-down strategies
• Enhanced cross-channel reconciliation, providing support for the unique needs of the retailer’s various channels and countries it operates in
• Met and exceeded the retailer’s omnichannel requirements, such as the consolidation of ownership and inventory visibility across its international, wholesale, direct (catalog and e-commerce) and outlet operations