Peter Leith, Vice President of Product Strategy Today’s consumers are always connected, armed with mobile devices and more information than ever before. They expect a seamless shopping experience across channels that delivers optimal assortments and flexible fulfillment options. Consumers quickly 'channel hop' throughout their shopping journeys and 'retailer-hop' if not finding what they want. This makes it difficult for retailers to merchandise assortments and maximize product inventory across physical and digital channels so products are available when and where shoppers want them.
“Before omni-channel retailing became the new standard, a retailer’s planning process was straightforward identify what to sell, who to sell it to, at what price to sell it and where to have it available ,” begins Peter Leith, Vice President of Product Strategy, Just Enough. “This was simple when applied at the individual selling channel level, but is very complex when trying to delivering a seamless hopping experience across a retailer’s multiple selling channels.” Just Enough, an Irvine, CA-based company aids retailers in addressing these challenges with its modern, flexible solutions designed from the ground up to support omni-channel retailing.
The company’s end-to-end retail planning solution supports a best practice merchandising process which starts with setting financial targets that drive all downstream planning processes. “Retailers using Just Enough automatically reconcile their plans back to these targets and avoid straying away from them as they move forward with pre-,in-and post-season plans,” says Leith. Just Enough also empowers retailers to track inventory investment within any time period or any part of the product and channel hierarchy. Having the appropriate level of visibility to the open-to-buy enables retailers to track the amount available to spend on additional receipts or to cut back on receipts not necessary within the organization’s merchandise plan.
“For ease of use, the open-to-buy capability works hand-in-hand with the merchandise financial planning and assortment planning processes,” added Leith.
JustEnough injects modern-day trends from cloud/SaaS to big data with a focus on process, people, data and systems to meet the planning needs of today’s omni-channel retailers
In addition, the Just Enough clustering engine quickly clusters customers and locations based on multiple performance, demographic and space metrics. Retailers using clustering can more accurately target assortments to the right customers.
“Introducing new products is both necessary and risky for retailers,” asserts Leith. With Just Enough, retailers use the assortment planning process to ensure that new products are phased in taking into account targets and current plans, to determine what products should be introduced, when and to which channels, ensuring that the assortment represents customer demand. Just Enough’s Profiling solution uses attributes of similar products to model the expected outcome of introducing a new product ensuring the correct quantity is available when and where it is needed, satisfying customers hungry for new products while reducing the retailer’s risk.
“The innovative Just Enough solutions are built by retail industry experts working in collaboration with leading retailers worldwide ensuring they stay ahead of retail’s latest trends,” adds Leith. Take for example, how the growing number of channels and digital touch points is dramatically increasing the volume of incoming data about customers’ shopping patterns, behaviors and purchases. Just Enough’s new Customer Insights solution is helping retailers to quickly identify causal relationships and opportunities inside large volumes of customer data and then quickly action those insights to improve merchandising, assortment, pricing and promotion decisions.
Just Enough plans to stay focused on continually enhancing and adding to its retail planning solution suite. Through this focus on innovation and partnership with leading retailers, Just Enough will continue to keep ahead of retail trends and to provide the best possible retail planning experience available in the market today.
