Retail

i2 helps retailers confront the challenges of the highly competitive contemporary retailing environment with advanced planning and supply chain software solutions that enable a superior, differentiated customer shopping experience, supply chain efficiency, and revenue growth.

Overview

In recent years a confluence of macro economic and structural trends created new pressures and new opportunities for retailers.

Barriers to global trade are tumbling down, and tectonic shifts in demographics are taking place that create an ageing population in North America and Europe and a rising middle class in other parts of the world. Additionally, dramatic geopolitcal events dominate headlines on a daily basis. These trends create opportunities for market expansion and cost advantages through the application of global sourcing strategies, but they also create a complex supply chain that is difficult and costly to manage, and unpredictable consumer spending patterns.

Concurrently, major structural changes are underway. Channels are blurring as retailers add new categories. Catalog retailers are opening physical stores; brick-and-mortar retailers are launching catalogs.  The dominant value formats are relentlessly compressing prices and stealing market share with their super-efficient supply chains and a consumer value proposition of "good enough quality" at a lower price.  In North America and Europe, many formats have saturated their markets with too many stores. New technologies are also available to enable new ways to service customers and enable lean supply chain strategies that were previously out of reach. Certain retailers are moving faster than others in the adoption of these technologies and enjoying the competitive advantage, while others fall further behind.

In order to enable to grow in this complex and highly competitive environment retailers must focus on three key strategy imperatives:

• Provide a high quality, differentiated customer experience by carrying the right products, at the right price and by reducing out of stocks
• Streamline and take cost out of the supply chain to maintain margins and competitiveness by improving asset utilization,  inventory visibility, and by ensuring that each division and supply chain partner has access to a uniform source of product and supply chain data
• Identify ways to grow revenue beyond simply opening more stores by providing assortments that are tailored to specific stores

Everyday, best-in-class retailers all over the world are using i2’s retail software solutions to power strategies that enable a superior, differentiated customer shopping experience, supply chain efficiency, and revenue growth. i2’s retail solutions are scalable, designed to wrap around a retailers unique business process, and are modularized to enable sensible and rapid implementations. With i2’s retail solutions, retailers can:

• Rapidly execute an advanced planning process that enables a differentiated superior shopping experience, customized to the store-level and capable of enabling course corrections in-season, while simultaneously driving inventory productivity
• Optimize the structure of the supply chain to support global sourcing and lean supply chain strategies, and also execute these strategies in the most cost efficient manner in order to protect and grow margins
• Rapidly, and cost effectively, implement and change planning and supply chain business processes that span organizations both inside and outside the four walls of the enterprise in order to stay ahead of the competition

Featured Solutions

With i2 Merchandise Financial Planning, retailers can build and reconcile their financial, product, and store plans, as well as develop a pre-assortment options plan that provides top-down guidance on the assortment breadth and mix, based on targeted selling price, time on offer, and rate of sale.

Channel blurring, price deflation, declining loyalty, and hyper-competition define the environment. Retailers must adhere to customer-centric strategies to protect and grow market share. Such strategies demand unprecedented precision, speed, and coordination in anticipating customer needs—down to the store level. Success in executing customer-centric merchandising strategies requires a next-generation approach to buying and assortment management.

Allocation and Replenishment Management is a comprehensive inventory management and distribution solution for retailers.

Retail Transportation Management Solutions synchronize critical transportation and distribution business processes, resulting in optimal cost and service performance.

i2’s proven Retail Master Data Management solutions allows a retailer to easily create a single enterprise thesaurus that ensures data is described, used, and stored in a consistent manner.

i2 Agile Business Process Platform enables retailers to implement planning and supply chain solutions quickly and with lower implementation costs. The Agile Business Process Platform also enables retailers to wrap i2’s solutions around the business processes that make them unique from competitors versus forcing a retailer to adhere to a canned, one-size-fits all process that gives up competitive advantage.