Jeans Centre and Garcia are well-known names in the fashion industry, always seeking to push the boundaries of efficiency and retail excellence. Behind the scenes, there's Nathalie van Heeren, a merchandise allocator with over five years of experience at Jeans Centre. Her insights are invaluable as she navigates the challenges of managing inventory across numerous stores. Find out how Smart Supply is helping Nathalie and her team make smarter decisions and create an efficient workflow during the event season.
Can you tell us more about your role at Jeans Centre? What is the main task of your job?
I have worked as a merchandise allocator at Jeans Centre for over 5 years. For those who don't know what that means, I usually describe it as being the inventory manager for the Jeans Centre stores. There is also a bit of Buying Assistant involved in my role. I ensure that everything is registered correctly in the system when purchasing collections. The specific months for dispatching the collections are already scheduled well in advance. After sending out the collections, my daily work really begins: figuring out which items are selling well and where, and making sure extra stock is sent to those locations. Without Chainbalance, this would be a hell of a job. Thanks to the algorithms, the system does most of my work.
What challenges can you expect when planning an event?
Distributing inventory effectively across 84 stores is always challenging, especially during specific promotions lasting 2 to 3 weeks. You have to deal with limited stock in the company, and when stock levels are low, you still need to distribute properly. Setting up the event and configuring the settings is crucial in making the correct allocations.
Jeans Centre frequently uses our "Smart Event Planning" tool. Why is it such an essential asset in your daily operations?
As mentioned above, at Jeans Centre, we have an extensive promotion twice a year that lasts 2.5 weeks. The longer you work with Chainbalance, the more data you gather. You can also retrieve data from reference periods to adjust current promotional weeks. Overall, Smart Event Planning gives you an advantage because you don't have to gather all the data manually. In addition to these two large promotions, it's also a tool that can be used for holidays and holiday periods, when we expect busy shopping periods.
How has the Smart Event Planning tool changed your day-to-day work? How did you plan events before?
I'll start by explaining how we worked before we started with Chainbalance. For promotions or during busy holidays, you would spend at least 2-3 weeks gathering data from previous years before the event started. You would compare the same holiday or promotional event from past years. Based on that information, you would manually increase inventory for each item's color combination in the system before the warehouse places those pieces in order. Manually increasing stock already took an entire workday. You'd think, great, the extra stock is in the stores, my job is done. Unfortunately, you also had to manually decrease the stock per item color after the event or holiday period ended, which would again take an entire workday. Now, with the right settings in the Event Planning Tool, you can do this in less than five minutes. It only requires a quick check to see if you agree with the Event Planning Tool's suggestions.
What kind of events do you use Smart Event Planning for?
- Twice yearly Denim Market (each event lasts 2.5 weeks)
- Holiday Must-Haves (2-3 weeks)
- Summer Deals (2-3 weeks)
- Winter Deals (2-3 weeks)
- VIP Night (2 evenings)
- All other holiday periods and events like Ascension Day, Easter, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Christmas holidays.
Are there any improvements or adjustments you'd recommend to enhance its effectiveness?
At Garcia and Jeans Centre, we are already very happy with all the options included in the Event Planning Tool. Of course, we have our own ideas for making it even more efficient. The Event Planning Tool has the option "freeze targets during the event." (You can freeze all targets or only the targets for items you selected in your event plan).
We are not big fans of freezing for a long event period. During a longer event, you want to optimize the sales opportunities as much as possible. If you don't freeze the targets, the targets can increase dramatically during the event. In my ideal vision for setting up an event, I see an "event target" that allows the targets to adjust freely during the event. When the event ends, the target should automatically reset to what it was before it started.