Fashion
Business and Inventory Challenges
Fashion-oriented businesses typically have short lifecycle seasonal collections. In season, achieving high service levels is critical because out-of-stocks immediately translate into lost sales. At the end of the season, discounting decimates gross margins. The logistical goal is to optimize inventories to trade off between lost margin from in-season lost sales and lost margin from end-of-season discounting. Simultaneously, there is a need to preserve all opportunities for in-season replenishment and centralized inventory with last minute deployment.In addition to seasonal items, an important portion of the business is based on continuous products with lifecycles longer than a single season. This means managing two different inventory processes in parallel.
What further complicates the fashion business is the scale of the supply chain. The different styles, colors and sizes create a very high number of SKUs per brand. And the distribution networks are vast, often entailing networks of millions of SKU-Locations. On the supply side, globalization requires dynamic evolution of the supply networks and alternative sourcing. Flexible modeling capabilities to evaluate alternative supply chain scenarios are becoming a strategic competitive edge. Traditional inventory and replenishment methods, which require substantial manual intervention, cannot efficiently and competitively operate such a network.
ToolsGroup's Unique Capabilities
ToolsGroup has consolidated years of experience in fashion into dedicated modeling and optimization techniques able to compute optimal time-phased inventories across the supply chain, delivering high in-season customer service levels and exit gracefully at the end of the season. The solution is highly scalable and able to manage simultaneously both seasonal and continuous items with their different business logic.ToolsGroup solutions also address many of the specific needs of fashion inventories such as handling:
- Seasonal demand-Modeling for fashion
- Sales windows
- Launch profiles
- M to N super-sessions
- Multistage rough cut capacity planning
- Strategic network modeling
Successes
ToolsGroup is successfully deployed at more than 10 fashion industry customers, such as:- Luxottica (eyewear, including retailers LensCrafters and SunGlass Hut)
- Marlboro Classics (Clothing)
- Marcolin (Eyewear)
- Pompea (Lingerie)