One Step wanted to take the opportunity to welcome David Downard to our Inventory Planning team.Joining fellow inventory management consultants— Doug Arvanite and Gord Peters, Dave will be assisting our clients to improve sales, merchandising, marketing and operations to help ensure their financial success and profitability.

So what does all of this actually mean?

 

Here's Dave to tell us a little bit more about his role with One Step and our Inventory Planning Solution.

"Retailers are concerned about many issues in managing a retail business but foremost is cash management and the ability to achieve profit goals. To maximize those goals requires, first, accurate and timely data, something that can be found with One Step's POS solutions and, second, an effective hierarchy of data that allows for quick analytics that a retailer can use to make key buying and merchandise performance decisions and, third, a merchandise planning system to track profitable performance at the class level. Every class needs to contribute to achieving profit goals and that requires concise and ongoing monitoring of merchandise performance.

My role with One Step and our retail clients is to assist in building these hierarchies (often referred to as Company/ Store/ Department/ Class/ Subclass mapping hierarchies or categories) so that when a retailer is reviewing merchandise performance, buying decisions can be made that maximize the profit potential for that merchandise. Too often, a category map is either so small that it limits the ability to view trends, risks and opportunities or too large that it becomes almost impossible to make any effective buying decisions.

I will work with our clients to make recommendations on how to map their business as the POS setup is being developed and before any implementation. This avoids and minimizes changes that need to be made later. Each retailer has unique buying patterns and how that information is viewed and how quickly decisions can be made are critical to a profitable business. A category assigned data that is too large can easily miss trends and patterns while too many classes with small amounts of data require a retailer to analyze at a level where it becomes tedious and ineffective.

Once the POS system has been installed and the data is mapped appropriately, we can discuss the advantages of a merchandise planning/open-to-buy systems that can be easily implemented."

Thanks for that, Dave!  Sounds like our clients' retail success is in very good hands.

Dave comes to us as an affiliate with Management One, our Inventory Planning and Consultation Partner. Before Management One, Dave worked for over thirty years with RMSA as a Senior Merchandising Analyst & Consultant and later as Vice President Sales & Marketing.  He started his retail career with some of the most highly respected retailers in the industry including Bullocks, Robinsons, and Dayton (now Target Corporation). He has had the opportunity to start his very own retail marketing and advertising firm and to manage high-end sporting goods stores, Go Sport.

With his wide range of experience and "hands-on" management within a very diverse retail/manufacturing industry, Dave continues to rely on his unique set of skills to see that his clients achieve their retail goals.

Welcome to the One Step Team, Dave. We are lucky to have you!