Plan Assortments, Optimize Pricing and Align Inventory to Real Demand

We used to manage assortment planning and MFP using spreadsheets, but this limited us to high-level plans. Centric Planning allows us to get to a more granular level and create data-driven plans and assortments. It will also standardize and rationalize planning as we scale up.

In terms of bringing the products that will drive us forward, drive growth and take us into the future, Centric ticks those boxes for us.

Before COVID, we had a 5.6% operating margin at the end of fiscal year 2020. We closed this past year at 12%. It is a huge improvement in profits! ...If we had had a lot of inventory, we could not have done it. Centric Planning has been an enabler to truly follow our strategy and increase our profitability in a very, very big way.

With Centric Planning, we have the tools we need for our sales team and partners to be more efficient, to support rapid strategic decision-making and to have full visibility of seasonal performance and budgets. Having the same tools available for our teams is critical when you are expanding into new markets.

With the new Centric Planning solution, buying and merchandising teams can work more collaboratively and are saving time because manual data entry has been eliminated. Being able to create what-if scenarios empowers teams to make strategic decisions faster and achieve sales and margin targets.

With Centric, we now have a single point of truth approach where everything is for the planners to do their job and the buyers to do their job. It supports collaborative work. The teams are working more efficiently and more effectively because there are parts of the tool you’d never be able to do using spreadsheets because assortments are so large. Planners are now able to take more responsibility and work with other stakeholders in ways they simply couldn’t in the past.

We have reduced our price reductions by about 2.5%. That translates into a 1% margin increase, which, on a 300 million-euro turnover, is a 3 million-euro increase to our bottom line. That’s quite a lot; more than we were expecting at the beginning of the project.