Logility announces Logility Voyager Retail Optimization V5.4

This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: Logility announces Logility Voyager Retail Optimization V5.4.

Logility Inc., supplier of advanced retail planning and supply chain optimisation solutions, has announced the availability of Logility Voyager Retail Optimization V5.4. This latest release extends the value of an integrated retail and supply chain platform and delivers new merchandise planning views, extended allocation functionality and robust assortment planning capabilities. In addition, Retail Optimization now leverages Logility Voyager Solutions' advanced analytics architecture to provide retailers greater insights into their comprehensive planning process, visualisation of key performance metrics and the ability to manage by exception.

According to the recent Boston Retail Partners report, 2014 Merchandise Planning & Allocation Survey, 76 percent of retailers lack visibility across their multiple channels of operation including online, mobile, in-store, and catalogue. The study highlights many retailers have been slow to adopt advanced retail planning solutions with more than 60 per cent of respondents relying on spreadsheets or homegrown solutions to meet today's complex planning and supply chain challenges. Retailers must turn to best-of-breed retail supply chain solutions that will deliver the capabilities needed to boost sales, increase margins and reduce inventory costs.

"Roadblocks from managing multiple silos of related planning data combined with a lack of visibility across their supply chain has created significant challenges for retailers to overcome," said Mike Edenfield, president and CEO, Logility. "These roadblocks limit visibility and introduce higher levels of inventory, sales and profitability risk across fast-moving retail operations. Logility Voyager Solutions delivers a comprehensive planning solution that spans merchandise financial planning, forecasting and time-phased inventory requirements from sourcing to store shelf to break down these barriers, improve planning, instill consistent business processes, and increase visibility. Voyager Retail Optimization V5.4 delivers more flexible allocations, greater inventory accuracy, tighter synchronization with vendors, and increased profitability for retailers."

Logility Voyager Retail Optimization V5.4 highlights include:

Analytics Everywhere

Retail supply chains continue to grow increasingly more complex due to factors including shorter seasons, increasing number of new product introductions and the need to more effectively leverage inventory across the Omni-channel. To stay ahead of these challenges and ensure success, today's retail organizations must have access to the right data and analytics when and where they want it.

Retail Optimization V5.4 transforms data into actionable information providing more alerts, role-based insights, key performance indicators, comparative scenario analysis, and integration with partner and supplier information. Priority-directed workflows and enhanced visualisation bring new insights and efficiencies to retail supply chain professionals, who can now engage and strategically evaluate retail performance and allocate merchandise to delight consumers. With visual assessment exception-based alerts, retailers are able to quickly understand current performance and assess the actions needed to achieve business goals with insight into gross margin achievement, weekly sales by department, and inventory performance compared to plans.

Merchandise Planning

Retail Optimization V5.4 introduces Ladder Plan views to enhance the planning process. In addition, Logility Voyager Merchandise Planning automatically supports the tailoring of rules based on a retailer's unique requirements.

As retailers focus on improving their multi-channel capabilities, Retail Optimization V5.4 now allows them to maintain separate Channel Inventory Pools in virtual locations while allowing the physical inventory to be kept in a single location. This greatly improves efficiency and allows planners to cost effectively plan inventory across the retail network to give each store the best opportunity to achieve its financial plan.

Assortment Planning

Logility Voyager Assortment Planning closes the gap between financial planning, store planning, and the buyer to accurately identify the optimal merchandise mix based on multiple factors including store cluster and location, the quantity of product to be carried, and the phasing of products into stores. According to the Boston Retail Partners 2014 research, 67 percent of respondents identified enhancing assortments as one of their top three priorities; with 65 percent planning to upgrade or replace their assortment planning application within three years.

The latest version simplifies assortment planning and makes it an easily repeatable process for retailers. Retail Optimization V5.4 utilizes the Wedge concept to dynamically assort stores into multiple volume ranges within a store attribute type. Retailers can then leverage attributes such as vendor, color, fabric, and silhouette for consideration and analysis in the assortment planning process. The allocation process can be directly linked to the assortment plan or modified as needed to reflect product receipts and current store needs.

Allocation and Replenishment

New Group Allocation functionality allows retailers to flexibly define and select a group of individual items to allocate together. All allocation rule options such as shipping to need, store cluster constraints, and referencing other allocation rules can be invoked for the group allocation assignments. This significantly streamlines the allocation process and enables allocation and replenishment teams to apply group minimum and maximum requirements to determine overall store-specific quantities. The Group Allocation rules further enable retailers to allocate groups of items while adhering to each item's specific constraints saving time and directly controlling the total quantity for all items at each selling location.