South African fashion retailer Foschini group is using a
size-scaling software package fromJDAto ensure that it sells more
garments at full price.
Foschini has 1300 stores split between 13 trading divisions that
sell quality and fashion clothing, jewellery and sports equipment
to the complex Southern African market.
Each store serves a different target market. This makes
optimising the stock and sizes immensely complex, even though there
are clusters of stores with similar customer profiles.
Brent Curry, the group's CIO, said the company uses the size
scaling software to get more of the right size clothing into the
right store at the right time. This maximises sales at full price
and minimises the number of goods marked down at the end of the
sales period.
"The markdown percentage is a key performance indicator for the
company," said Baziel Barends, Foschini's merchandise systems
manager. The figure for the group is currently around 8%. "We hope
the size-scaling system will help us cut markdowns by 1% and
increase sales by 0.5%, and we expect the system to pay for itself
within one season."
The size-scaling system works out the optimal "curve" or range
of sizes and order quantities for each garment. "Ideally we will
sell out of each size of every range on the last day of the full
price selling period," Barends said.
The information systems department runs a raft of JDA products
with Oracle on IBM AIX and NT servers. All 1300 stores are online,
feeding JDA's Portfolio Mechandise Management system to enable the
company to have "one version of the truth," said Curry.
Arnaud Decarsin, MD for JDA's Europe, Middle East and Africa
division, said Foschini's IT department played a key role in
extending JDA's Intellect data-mining tool for clustering retail
stores based on products sold, by adding more forecasting, sizing,
packaging and usability. The refinements engineered by Foschini are
now part of JDA's standard size-scaling package.
"Foschini is a very demanding client, one we have had for nearly
10 years, and it could not do without very sophisticated use of
IT," he said. "We are always happy to work so intimately with such
users because everyone benefits."