November 17th, 2023

Centric Software Sprints Ahead with Fast, Easy and Smart Retail Planning

Leading companies adopting Centric Planning to improve assortment planning, visual reporting and team collaboration

CAMPBELL, Calif., November 20, 2023 – Centric Software® has announced the addition of new market-driven innovations to its next-generation retail planning solution, Centric Planning™. Centric Software provides the most innovative enterprise solutions to plan, design, develop, source, buy, make, price, allocate, sell and replenish, products such as fashion, outdoor, luxury, multi-category retail, grocery, food & beverage, cosmetics & personal care and consumer electronics to achieve strategic and operational digital transformation goals.

Introduced to the retail industry in 2018 to meet the needs of the omnichannel age and with high user adoption in mind, Centric Planning shows a concrete return on investment by vastly improving margins, optimizing inventory management and transforming the way teams are collaborating.

Centric Planning is part of Centric Software’s newly unveiled concept to replenishment product solution experience to drive go-to-market innovation and value creation for consumer goods retailers, brands and manufacturers. A best-of-breed solution in its own right, Centric Planning delivers easy-to-use and visually-driven financial, merchandise and product portfolio planning as well as store and vendor forecasting for seamless and fast pre- and in-season execution and pivoting. Like all Centric solutions, Centric Planning integrates easily with other business systems. Centric Planning’s sophisticated AI/ML engine drives strategic decision-making and optimizes SKU and omnichannel management by leveraging advanced analytics and forecasting. Its cloud-native, SAAS architecture empowers high-speed processing and powerful performance, even when handling large volumes of data.

Centric Planning empowers brands and retailers, especially those with high volumes of SKUs, to disrupt their markets with new and modern ways to efficiently execute their merchandise planning. Its highly configurable, out-of-the-box, modular approach enables brands and retailers to conduct their merchandise financial planning in the same solution environment as their assortment, allocation, replenishment and demand planning, bringing a competitive and strategic end-to-end approach to retail planning.

Centric Software recently welcomed leading retailers from around the world such as PVH Europe, Triumph, Blue Star Group, Style Union, Bestseller Fashion Group China, LPP, Magazine Zum Globus, Trespass and Gap China as new Centric Planning users, showing a strong market response to its powerful capabilities and strategic value. These new users join a strong list of leading fashion retailers who have already adopted the solution such as Guess, Replay, About You and many more. ROI and benefits cited by users include the following:

200+% increase in operating margins
75% reduction in planning cycle
Synchronized top-down and bottom-up planning processes
Accelerated time to market by 2 weeks
Reduction in logistics costs
Greater employee satisfaction

Furthermore, customers report a 100 percent user adoption rate, thanks to Centric Planning’s intuitive interface and best-in-class combination of visual and data-driven planning.

Iconic fashion retailer, Guess, implemented Centric Planning in 2021 and is experiencing the benefits of the solution’s flexibility, improved visibility, powerful data handling capabilities and ability to integrate with other enterprise systems, reporting an increase of over 200% to their operating margins.

“Without Centric Planning our jobs would be impossible today.” says Daniel Botey, Vice President of Global Inventory Management at Guess Europe Sagl. “It is an enabler for us to get the product to the right channels on time. This is huge for us. The feedback from all the users is really positive; they like the tool. It’s very intuitive.”

Pedro Monteiro, Global Sales Planning Lead of new customer, Triumph, says, “We saw a superior planning technology solution and Centric customer referrals shared positive feedback including rapid deployment, high user adoption and quick, tangible business results. We also liked that Centric Planning was built for the omni-channel age. With Centric Planning we expect to be far more agile in two key areas — forecast accuracy and time to market by speeding all aspects of the planning process and rapidly responding to market changes.”

“We are constantly innovating and working in partnership with our customers to develop features that best serve their needs and aims,” says Riccardo Proni, VP, Planning R&D at Centric Software. “In the last twelve months, we have added almost 100 new features to Centric Planning. For instance, brands and retailers can now plan assortments by combining visual product data pulled from any PLM with Centric Planning’s number-crunching abilities using the Visual Assortment Board for Planning, one of our interactive Centric Visual Boards.”

“We are proud to say that Centric Planning is going from strength to strength, with the addition of many new customers and market-driven features to enable an omnichannel, consumer-centric approach to planning that fits into a seamless concept to replenishment experience,” says Chris Groves, CEO of Centric Software. “Centric Planning is a future-ready solution and we are proud to partner with leading brands and retailers to continue to innovate in response to market need.”

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