SCDigest: Top Consumer Goods and Retail Supply Chains for 2009

We all heard a lot about JDA becoming a leader in supply chain. Here is a link to an interesting article on the other end of the spectrum i.e. the businesses who are actually using such supply chain/retail products. The article ranks the companies worldwide who are leading in supply chain management (for year 2009) and what are they looking for while pursuing a better supply chain.

Here is the link......http://www.retailwire.com/Discussions/Sngl_Discussion.cfm/14304? (if asked for registration, it is free).

Planning budget allocation for the next season?

I was just curious when sales budget is planned for the next season how is the budget proportionately allocated between full price sales and markdown sales? Is it based on past sales data for a similar product or is it just an industry average the retailers follow? And what other data a planner/category manager looks at for a pre-season planning?

It would be interesting to know how pre-season planning is done when most of the time only information a planner would have is past seasons' sales data. If our pre-season plan is off by a large number then it would be a lot of in-season corrections for the planner! Let me know what you guys think.

Analytical Retailing

Recently there was an article about how retailers are using computing powers to study how consumer behavior as well economics can be used to study as well as affect customer shopping. The article further talks about analytical software being used to understand consumer patterns. It talks about how web applications are playing a role in consumer choices for shopping; so we can say power is shifting more from retailer to the consumers. The article further states and I quote "The company also uses analytics software to optimize operations — including marketing, shipping, distribution and manufacturing." To add a bit retailers are also realizing importance of demand based pricing optimization which is the heart of pricing suite of products for JDA. Of course the article is US retailing-centric but these changes would happen in India as organized retail grows. Here is a link to the article.........http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/business/03unboxed.html?ref=business