Forecasting and planning with Open to Buy software
A successful retail business hinges on your ability to accurately analyze data from the past and incorporate it into plans for the future. In today’s competitive market there is simply no room for you to “wing it” or make uninformed decisions about pricing, stocking, and other planning-related choices. ChainDrive’s retail management software package comes equipped with a couple of different components that allow you to manage the entire planning process from an user-friendly, fully integrated database. Here we will look at the Open-to-Buy software and its key features that help you plan your retail strategies.
The software’s dynamic controls and user-definable attributes allow you to handle planning at multiple levels, from units to dollars, at cost, or down to sub-class. The second feature is its extensive data display, which gives you options for many different types of graphing, top-down or bottom-up allocation, and a wide range of performance indicators to pinpoint certain aspects. It’s a two-pronged approach: you control what you want to see and how you want to see it.
Another important feature is the ability to compare your plans with historical data. The comparative analysis is a major indicator of how well a certain plan may function given information from your retail history.
Open-to-Buy also features stock level forecasting that generates relevant receipt patterns by looking at your stock-to-sales ratios.
The flexibility offered in our planning software lets you control everything retail-related by units or by cost. It has the ability to plan for and maintain multiple different seasonal strategies. If you want to have the most concrete and effective plan that there is, you should check out our Open-to-Buy software component.