Case Study - COLORADO group
Planning - One of the holy grails of retail
COLORADO’s planning solution reduces unsecured spreadsheets
COLORADO group is a leading footwear and apparel retailer and wholesaler with more than 430 stores in Australia and New Zealand, and a proactive acquisition policy with the aim of building a formidable portfolio of mid to upper-middle market brands.
Like all retailers, the sales and inventory planning process is critical to COLORADO group’s business success, to ensure that the right stock is in the right store at the right time. The company’s planning group historically used stand-alone spreadsheets for planning, due to their flexibility and ease of use. However as the company grew in size and complexity, spreadsheets posed significant issues. For the company, there were risks around maintaining and debugging spreadsheets, ensuring consistent processes, and controlling data versioning. For end-users, there was a lack of visibility into the overall planning process, and problems around data integrity and re-keying. For example, a single product category plan was found to have 18 templates, and up to 92 instances in a single year. Planning staff who were meant to be following the same process were sometimes using different parts of the original planning spreadsheet.
Aims
Group Planning Manager, Sasha Lazarus, explains that a corporate solution was required. “We needed to consolidate our data and provide company-wide visibility into the planning process,” he said. “We also wanted to make sure that processes were consistent and also that the planning team could share ideas and data easily.”
Another requirement for the planning solution was flexibility to enable top-down, middle-out and bottom-up planning. For instance, top down to look at overall stock turn and profitability, middle-out to plan for product categories such as the total number of boots in the business, and bottom-up to build plans for individual stores and product lines.
Solution
“We chose Zap Office because the Excel front-end was so familiar to our users and the roll-up functionality was sophisticated and easy to use. We knew we could get instant results without a long change management and training process,” Sasha said. “The Zap solution is fast, which is essential when users are dealing with large datasets and thousands of modifications. We could also easily build reporting layers that aligned lower-level inputs with higher level planning.”
The solution is opened from the corporate intranet, ensuring that everyone uses the latest Excel template. Planners use these corporate spreadsheets to plan their purchases, sales and profitability. But the data is not stand-alone – it is written back to a central database from Excel. Staff save versions of their plans and commit their changes so they can be viewed by wider teams and management. If a planner sees another sales plan or demand curve they like, they can copy it for their own use. Plans can even be created for products that don’t yet exist, and individual plans can be rolled up for an aggregate view.
Results
Sasha explained that the solution is working well at the item level. “We have a foothold with the technology at the bottom-up planning level, and we have worked extensively with users to take their needs into account. Our longer term view is to build the solution up at successively higher levels so that we can manage the planning process at the middle-out and top-down levels effectively and efficiently.”