Merchandising Systems Features and Functions
Merchandising systems are the enterprise back and front-office software solutions upon which the majority of retailers rely to manage and support their daily tasks. These systems typically record product performance, which allows buyers to purchase merchandise according to that information and to make accurate merchandise decisions. Moreover, retail systems have capabilities for tracking inventory, capturing sales data, and managing retail prices.
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Inventory Management
Inventory management tracks the ins and outs of a product down to the color and size level, using capabilities such as purchase order process, receipt process, allocation process, distribution process, transfer process, style consolidation process, physical count process, and inventory freeze process
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Inventory Optimization
Inventory optimization consists of tools used by merchandisers to make important buying and selling decisions regarding inventory. Though vendors employ different terms, such as strategic merchandise management, merchandise and assortment planning, planning decision support, and replenishment, to describe inventory optimization, they refer to software that helps merchandisers make accurate decisions and ensures products are placed at the right time, price, and place. The tools used by inventory optimization often includes planning, forecasting, replenishment, and stock optimization.
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Price Management
Price management encompasses a group of applications for maintaining records item's prices. Price management includes functionalities, such as creation of markdowns, markups, promotions, discounts, etc.
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Revenue Management
Revenue management’s main purpose is to ensure that inventory is sold at the right price. It does this by looking at sales history and trends, sometimes with the help of a planning and forecasting tool. Revenue management also aids in creating promotional events, such as “two for one sales”, to attract more consumers into the store. In addition, it is responsible for determining markdowns, which allow retailers to liquidate discontinued or out of fashion products in order to lessen losses.
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Master
The master group includes all the setup information that a retailer needs to enter before using a merchandising system.
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POS
A point of sale (POS) system helps retailers automate transactions. POS solutions are used in retail stores where sales associates must enter sales, refunds, layaways, transfers, etc. The following POS criteria covers inventory management, register management, price management, transaction management, and other capabilities.
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Reports and Inquiries
Reports and inquiries encompasses a group of reports or inquiries that are available throughout the point of sale (POS) system.
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Product Technology
This group of criteria defines the technical architecture of the product as well as the technological environment in which the product can run successfully. Criteria include product and application architecture, software usability and administration, platform and database support, application standards support, communications and protocol support and integration capabilities. Relative to the other evaluation criteria, best practice selections place a lower relative importance on the product technology criterion. This apparently lower importance is deceptive because the product technology usually houses the majority of the selecting organization's mandatory criteria, which generally include server, client, protocol and database support, application scalability, and other architectural capabilities. The definition of mandatory criteria within this set often allows the client to quickly narrow the long list of potential vendors to a short list of applicable solutions that pass muster relative to the most basic mandatory selection criteria.
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Supply Chain Management (SCM) Features and Functions
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