NEW YORK, Jan. 15 /- 2007 NRF CONFERENCE, BOOTH # 1943 -- Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN), the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, continues to extend its retail market leadership, announcing today the launch of a new retail performance solution -- its fourth over the past year -- designed to help chains improve top-down, bottom-up planning for merchandise sales, margin and gross profit by division, channel, department or category.
The Cognos Strategic Merchandise Planning Blueprint provides a complete performance management framework - including planning, metrics and reporting - that helps retail managers and executives meet sales objectives and profitability goals through an improved merchandise planning process that is fully synchronized with other parts of the organization, particularly finance, operations and marketing. Using a single performance management system ensures bottom-up planning across the enterprise to support business strategies for growth, margins, market share and customer satisfaction.
"Success in retail depends on the chain's ability to balance supply and demand to meet customer needs while protecting margins. Chains that have an integrated process and give merchandise planners a single tool to complete top-down and bottom-up planning have a significantly higher chance of success," said Brian Hume, president of Martec International, a leading consulting and training firm that specializes in merchandise management, supply chain management and store operations business processes. "Building a solid, integrated merchandise planning process that links merchandisers with marketing, operations and finance ensures that the chain is managing to common financial goals and business objectives. This helps pave the way for higher sales, improved inventory turnover, fewer markdowns, and by extension, higher profits."
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