To optimize store-level plans that drive superior operational and financial performance, retailers today need an intuitive and cross-disciplinary planning solution that adheres to industry best practices and supports rapid and intelligent decision making. But many retailers still rely on spreadsheets and disconnected databases that are difficult to maintain and integrate. When underlying budget drivers or business structures change, the burden often falls on your finance and store operations staff to make time-consuming and error-prone manual updates. Adding to the challenge, the retail sector is highly volatile. To survive and thrive, you must have the ability to quickly adapt to change, stay ahead of changing trends, identify and mitigate risk, and monitor performance in near-real time while maintaining alignment with corporate operations.

With SAP BusinessObjects solutions that support retailers, you can manage the unique planning challenges inherent to the retail industry.

SAP BusinessObjects includes comprehensive planning functionality that supports:

• Comparable sales planning models – Calculate, measure, and project complex same-store analytics.
• Seasonal revenue modeling – Analyze and plan weekly revenue properly adjusted for seasonal events.
• Collaboration – Reach a broad set of business users from all disciplines within the organization.
• Data integration – Maintain a single, consistent version of your corporate performance information that aggregates transactional, analytic, and real-time data.
• Financial accountability – Address tightening government regulations by keeping retail accounting practices transparent.

As a result, you can reduce TCO through lower total resource expenditure, enhance problem solving with past performance analysis and what-if scenarios, and improve your product and account management through deeper insight into the local merchandising mix and performance-to-forecast details. Empowering you to gain – and sustain – a competitive edge.

Want to Learn More?

"Streamlining Retail Financial Planning" (PDF)