Oct17

The Business Process of Category Management

by admin on October 17th, 2007 at 4:42 am
Posted In: Category Management

SAP for Retail solutions cover the key processes in category management, including:

  • Strategic planning – SAP for Retail helps you develop your rolling three-year strategic plans by providing historic data analysis capabilities as the basis of forward projections, and enabling you to build financial models of various potential plan scenarios. With SAP solutions, you can analyze prior financial performance, customer trends, and your competition, and develop alternative forward plans.
  • Category business planning and management – With SAP for Retail, you can plan the selection you will carry for the next season or year (private-label goods, seasonal, or basic items), determine financial targets for that selection, and then manage the achievement of those targets. SAP solutions support key tasks, such as category planning, product hierarchy definition, initial product order placement, initial allocations for new articles, performance tracking, and new product development.
  • Price and revenue management – SAP for Retail helps you optimize and manage prices throughout the product life cycle, including initial pricing as well as promotional, markdown, or clearance pricing. Once prices are optimized to be consistent with your unique customer demand, you can change prices individually or via automatic mass maintenance based on pre-specified dates, by item, store, zone, or region. Prices can be downloaded to stores with start and end dates and times for automatic management of the complete pricing cycle.
  • Promotion planning and management – SAP for Retail solutions enable you to plan, execute, and evaluate the success of promotions. With SAP solutions, you can plan individual promotions, determine promotional order quantities, place promotional orders based on historical information, allocate promotional inventory, and evaluate the success of your promotions.

Category management is enabled with SAP applications such as SAP Customer Relationship Management and SAP ERP. To find out how these applications can improve your category management, please complete the “Contact SAP” form and request information about customer relationship management or enterprise resource planning.