Escalate Inventory & Merchandising

Escalate Merchandising facilitates the constant flow of responsive assortments throughout the organization. Merchants can quickly and effectively determine the optimum stock positions for their entire assortment across all channels and locations, and focus on developing assortments that are driven by margins, revenue, brand image, and return on investment.

Decision Support

Merchandising delivers online tools to provide decision makers a single source of accurate, timely information. It provides current and historical analytical data for all activities critical to retail success, including sales, on-hand inventory position, on-order receipts, distributions, pricing strategies, inventory adjustments, and returns to vendor. Real-time sales performance data facilitates timely markdown analysis that enables buyers to more accurately manage their open-to-buy dollars.

Combining Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Best Business Practices, it delivers performance data to desktops across the enterprise in retail-friendly formats to reveal trends, expose opportunities, and execute strategic plans that drive ROI and provide competitive edge. Merchandising manages prices by any combination of vendor, style, color, size, store, and price type. Managers can use the flexibility inherent in Merchandising to analyze customer response patterns and tailor promotions and pricing strategies accordingly. High-caliber applications provide quick, accurate, at-a-glance answers to the mission-critical questions of what, how, when, why, and where.

Purchasing

Buyers can easily juggle all the day-to-day responsibilities for purchasing products to exceed strategic profit objectives and ensure sufficient inventory levels throughout all channels and locations. Orders can easily be entered, managed, and approved from the office, the stores, or while on site with vendors. Powerful connectivity tools and the ability to more effectively manage open to buy allow buyers to execute purchase decisions when and where opportunities arise, maximizing purchasing power and optimizing productivity. provides the advantage of real-time inventory information to merchants as they make the critical merchandising decisions that drive the organization's performance.

Real-time Inventory

Detailed, up-to-the-second knowledge of every inventory transaction, including reservations, sales, returns, purchases, advance shipping notices, receipts, distributions, transfers, cycle counts, and repairs ensures that the best available information is used to determine which products are right for which stores at what price points. Escalate Inventory provides real-time inventory information to decision makers throughout the organization to support and validate merchandising plans, maximize sales and GMROI, and minimize stock-outs and markdowns. Ultimately, precise inventory control enables retailers to realize the full potential of their inventory investments while providing a more satisfying shopping experience for their customers.

Comprehensive inventory monitoring and controls deliver complete visibility into every movement of every item throughout the entire inventory life cycle. Flexible cost management applications deliver tight margin controls and timely notification of cost fluctuations and margin-impacting incidents. Comprehensive and flexible retail stock ledger applications deliver adaptable retail methods and accounting tools to merchandising, financial, and operations decision makers across the organization to ensure accurate cost accounting and margin management for every item in inventory.

Cross-Channel Visibility

Cross-channel retail generates great volumes of data that must be processed, stored, and made available to diverse users and decision makers across the enterprise. To streamline this process, Escalate has integrated a comprehensive Retail Data Warehouse into Enterprise1 General retail. Escalate’s Retail Data Warehouse optimizes the storage, access, and analysis of high volumes of retail transaction data to enable accurate and timely analysis that leads to dramatically improved merchandise performance.

Data Warehouse

Escalate’s Retail Data Warehouse facilitates powerful, multi-year analysis of all sales channels, product categories, and locations across numerous dimensions, including: Sales, Returns, Vendor performance, On Order Status, Purchases, Receipts, Color, Size, and Dimension. As a result, your merchants are capable of fine-tuning their purchases to result in assortments that optimize product characteristics that most appeal to your customers, including price point optimization, size and color optimization, and markdown planning.

Escalate Inventory & Merchandising

Escalate Merchandising facilitates the constant flow of responsive assortments throughout the organization. Merchants can quickly and effectively determine the optimum stock positions for their entire assortment across all channels and locations, and focus on developing assortments that are driven by margins, revenue, brand image, and return on investment.

Decision Support

Merchandising delivers online tools to provide decision makers a single source of accurate, timely information. It provides current and historical analytical data for all activities critical to retail success, including sales, on-hand inventory position, on-order receipts, distributions, pricing strategies, inventory adjustments, and returns to vendor. Real-time sales performance data facilitates timely markdown analysis that enables buyers to more accurately manage their open-to-buy dollars.

Combining Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Best Business Practices, it delivers performance data to desktops across the enterprise in retail-friendly formats to reveal trends, expose opportunities, and execute strategic plans that drive ROI and provide competitive edge. Merchandising manages prices by any combination of vendor, style, color, size, store, and price type. Managers can use the flexibility inherent in Merchandising to analyze customer response patterns and tailor promotions and pricing strategies accordingly. High-caliber applications provide quick, accurate, at-a-glance answers to the mission-critical questions of what, how, when, why, and where.

Purchasing

Buyers can easily juggle all the day-to-day responsibilities for purchasing products to exceed strategic profit objectives and ensure sufficient inventory levels throughout all channels and locations. Orders can easily be entered, managed, and approved from the office, the stores, or while on site with vendors. Powerful connectivity tools and the ability to more effectively manage open to buy allow buyers to execute purchase decisions when and where opportunities arise, maximizing purchasing power and optimizing productivity. provides the advantage of real-time inventory information to merchants as they make the critical merchandising decisions that drive the organization's performance.

Real-time Inventory

Detailed, up-to-the-second knowledge of every inventory transaction, including reservations, sales, returns, purchases, advance shipping notices, receipts, distributions, transfers, cycle counts, and repairs ensures that the best available information is used to determine which products are right for which stores at what price points. Escalate Inventory provides real-time inventory information to decision makers throughout the organization to support and validate merchandising plans, maximize sales and GMROI, and minimize stock-outs and markdowns. Ultimately, precise inventory control enables retailers to realize the full potential of their inventory investments while providing a more satisfying shopping experience for their customers.

Comprehensive inventory monitoring and controls deliver complete visibility into every movement of every item throughout the entire inventory life cycle. Flexible cost management applications deliver tight margin controls and timely notification of cost fluctuations and margin-impacting incidents. Comprehensive and flexible retail stock ledger applications deliver adaptable retail methods and accounting tools to merchandising, financial, and operations decision makers across the organization to ensure accurate cost accounting and margin management for every item in inventory.

Cross-Channel Visibility

Cross-channel retail generates great volumes of data that must be processed, stored, and made available to diverse users and decision makers across the enterprise. To streamline this process, Escalate has integrated a comprehensive Retail Data Warehouse into Enterprise1 General retail. Escalate’s Retail Data Warehouse optimizes the storage, access, and analysis of high volumes of retail transaction data to enable accurate and timely analysis that leads to dramatically improved merchandise performance.

Data Warehouse

Escalate’s Retail Data Warehouse facilitates powerful, multi-year analysis of all sales channels, product categories, and locations across numerous dimensions, including: Sales, Returns, Vendor performance, On Order Status, Purchases, Receipts, Color, Size, and Dimension. As a result, your merchants are capable of fine-tuning their purchases to result in assortments that optimize product characteristics that most appeal to your customers, including price point optimization, size and color optimization, and markdown planning.

Allocation Planning

Escalate’s Allocation Planning provides retailers with high-level merchant plans and lower level assortment plans that turn corporate goals into a reality. With Allocation Planning, retailers can easily maximize sales and minimize markdowns and stock-outs. Additionally, by using a single source of data, managers, planners and vendors can collaborate to develop multiple working plans across the supply chain.

Escalate's Allocation Planning includes:

• Customer-centric assortments
• Powerful store clustering capabilities
• Sophisticated methodology with complex algorithms

Key Features:

• Planning at all merchandise and operational levels
• Spread strategic plans down to any level of detail
• Work from bottom up to accurately reflect sales patterns
• Middle-out planning capability to focus on specific plans
• Built-in and user-formatted planning screen
• User-definable alerts for exception planning tools

Escalate Planning & Analytics

Easy to implement and use, Escalate Planning allows planners to dynamically forecast, create, analyze, and manage merchandise plans and assortments to quickly reduce markdowns, increase margins, and maximize profits. Escalate Retail Planning facilitates well-implemented planning processes to help develop better initial assortments that anticipate consumer expectations to minimize markdowns and reduce the number of shoppers who leave empty handed. Using data from a single source, managers, planners, and vendors can use Merchandise Planning collaboratively to develop multiple working plans, compare current year with prior years, and perform top-down, bottom-up, and middle-out planning. The result is one unified road map that can be quickly and easily adjusted to meet changing business and consumer trends and capture fast-moving sales opportunities.

Once high-level merchandise plans are set, merchants can use Assortment Planning to create customer-centric assortments that take into account store type, floor space, and seasons to deliver the right mix of products and value for targeted customers. Powerful store clustering capabilities support efficient micro-merchandising by logical groupings of stores based upon key attributes such as weather zone, location, store size, and layout, as well as dynamic groups based upon performance, resulting in intuitive assortments that respond to localized characteristics and nuances. Store clustering shrinks the size of the store-planning task and provides the basis for developing customized store assortments.

Escalate Planning employs complex algorithms that, when combined with the individual organization's business rules and workflow, quickly create highly accurate merchandising forecasts without resulting to multiple spreadsheets. Powerful tools facilitate planning at the lowest level of detail. Exceptional scalability, power, performance, and flexibility allow users to dynamically forecast, create, analyze, and manage merchandise plans and assortments, and incorporate other business-critical data into one consolidated plan.

Analytics delivers a common analytical platform built upon industry-standard technologies to translate data into consistent, meaningful, and actionable information that helps retailers to fully leverage their data across the enterprise. Fast, accurate, consistent, and easy to use, Escalate Analytics replaces time-consuming, error-prone spreadsheets with easy-to-use business intelligence solutions. Analytics employs drill down, slice and dice, and interactive graphical analysis to turn vast amounts of enterprise data into manageable, actionable information.

Combining Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Best Business Practices, Analytics establishes analytical parameters that make it easy for everyone in the organization to understand and use. Analytics improves sales, margins, and profitability by regulating inventory and making merchandising decisions based on performance. Analytics is deployable over the Internet, allowing the entire organization to access critical business intelligence on a controlled, as-needed basis. Getting the right information to the right people at the right time enables them to seize opportunities for greater sales and profits that might otherwise be missed. Putting Analytics on the Web also ensures the consistency of information across the enterprise, and optimizes communication to foster quicker decisions.

Size Optimization

Escalate’s Size Optimization provides retailers with highly integrated recommended store demand forecasting features with automated fulfillment transaction creation. Size Optimization also includes automated calculation of store demand based on sales, inventory, presentation standards, and sophisticated user-definable algorithms. By taking advantage of Escalate’s Size Optimization capabilities, retailers can realize minimized stock outs and markdowns, optimized inventory and sales, and increased customer satisfaction levels.

Escalate's Size Optimization includes recommended fulfillment from multiple inventory sources including:

• Inbound purchase orders
• Warehouse/data center receipts
• Advanced shipment notification
• Existing warehouse stock
• New PO issuance to vendor
• Inter-store stock balancing (future plan)

Escalate Supply Chain

Effective collaboration depends upon the timely, accurate, and seamless exchange of information between all trading partners. Electronic Document Exchange speeds the accurate transmission of purchase orders, purchase order acknowledgements, advance ship notices, invoices, and many other transaction types to trading partners throughout the supply chain. By integrating e-mail, web applications, electronic data interchange (EDI), and XML, into a unique "Any-to-Any" exchange, critical documents are translated into the appropriate format for the immediate electronic flow of information between business partners of any size, running on any platform. Electronic Document Exchange streamlines and integrates the supply chain to reduce operational costs, shorten the order cycle, and increase customer satisfaction. For more information, please visit http://www.furnishnet.com.

Escalate Sales Audit

Escalate's Sales Audit capabilities are fully integrated into our Enterprise1 General Retail solution. Escalate Sales Audit is a comprehensive auditing, balancing, and reporting tool that gives you complete control over the accuracy and integrity of all POS activity. The sales Audit module empowers you to improve the efficiency, accuracy and performance of the sales audit process with a powerful and comprehensive solution:

• Maintain a complete online journal of all POS activity
• Automatically adjust, approve, and balance all cashier and channel transactions within defined tolerances
• Post daily updated and audited sales figures the Retail stock Ledger and General Ledger
• Customize summary reporting of all sales activity, including entries in important documents like the Net sales Journal or the Cash Receipts worksheet
• Assign user-defined General Ledger posting codes to each POS transaction
• Search and retrieve data by channel, location, cashier, date, time, transaction amount , etc.
• Use flexible data mapping tools to track, manage, and report unique transactions and transaction types