Using Open-to-Buy as an effective alternative to bulky spreadsheets
Many businesses and departments dealing in large amounts of data have traditionally used programs like Microsoft Excel to organize, analyze, and produce relevant information concerning the performance of their retail location(s). While Excel certainly has the capability to accomplish a wide range of analyses and actions, it can have a steep learning curve and you’ll often need to be switching between multiple spreadsheets to glean important information about your work. ChainDrive’s retail management software is designed to be an all-in-one central database with all of the functionality of the market’s top software. The Planning or Open-to-Buy component exhibits a couple of important features that allow our retail management solutions to rival the most popular of systems.
Open-to-Buy is designed to help you plan your retail activity in units, dollars, and by location, department, or even by season. The idea is that you will use information you’ve learned from analyzing the market and your budget to make informed decisions about which products will appear where, and in what quantity. You can make those organizational plans a reality with Open-to-Buy. But the bigger your business is, the more data you will have to work with. Thankfully, our Planning software offers the flexibility and user-definable views to let you do whatever you want.
Take the “Plan, Validate & Lock” system. It allows you to effectively lock a single cell or an entire sub-group when working with a large array of data in order to isolate it from any other mass actions you might take. You might do this for important data to keep it in the foreground while comparing it to surrounding numbers, or you might just segregate certain products or departments from otherwise store-wide changes.
When making the move towards a more fully-integrated and user-friendly software package, you’ll want to be sure you won’t be missing any useful tools from the previous systems you’ve used. ChainDrive promises full functionality in all of its software components.
