Big league power and features for little league cost and fit
For retailers big and small, an effective Merchandise Financial Planning (MFP) process is critical for maximizing profitability, optimizing inventory, and meeting customer expectations. Excel is a de-facto solution used by many, yet the time comes when scalability, reliability and seamless planning collaboration call for a better fit solution. Blue Sky’s MFP cloud solution provides an industry best practice based, feature rich, powerful, scalable platform designed to streamline planning processes for retailers to ensure accuracy and consistency across all channels.
Key Benefits of Blue Sky's MFP:
- Accuracy and consistency: Streamlined process and one version of truth across departments reduces manual effort, minimizes errors, facilitates version control, and enhances coordination.
- Simplicity and Agility: A user-friendly interface and real-time data manipulation allow for agile, accurate adjustments pre-season and in-season.
- Effortless Integrations: Easily integrates with upstream data such as forecast and sales, and downstream solutions such as Assortment planning and BI reporting.
- Dynamic and Holistic Viewing: Flexible views on any scope of data, enabling retailers to avoid siloed views and to adapt to changing circumstances.
- Cross-Channel and Multi-Currency Planning: Tailor plans for various channels and customer journeys globally, ensuring optimized inventory investments and maximized margins.
Blue Sky’s MFP includes advanced features and capabilities:
- Modern dashboard: Single view of all relevant KPIs with visual representation of key metrics and trends, with the ability to drill down into details and plan at lower levels as well as at higher, aggregated levels.
- Configurable process: Comprehensive editing of configurations, tightly integrated with the client’s data, offering access to all configuration elements, template-based measure creation, extensive validity testing, and protections to avoid data overwrites.
- Flexible measures: Allows the creation and modification of measures, with hierarchical templates and extensive validity checking. Integrated translation handling and internal options provide further customization.
- Editable workbooks: A detailed editor enables creation and customization of workbooks, with a visual layout designer and integrated validity checking to prevent misconfigurations.
- Managed environments: Configurations can be applied and imported across dev/test/prod environments, with extended tests to avoid data loss and ensure seamless transitions. Parallel configuration versions allow multiple team members to work simultaneously.
Scalability for All Retailers
Blue Sky’s MFP is designed to grow with your business, offering tailored packages that suit different sizes of business:
- Essential Package: Ideal for small retailers, managing up to 5,000 item locations with up to 3 users. This package is perfect for businesses seeking to streamline their financial planning processes without overwhelming complexity.
- Advanced Package: Suitable for medium-sized retailers, supporting up to 10,000 item locations and up to 10 users, offering more advanced features for growing operations.
- Enterprise Package: Custom solutions for large retailers with over 10,000 item locations and unlimited users, providing comprehensive tools for extensive financial planning needs.
Blue Sky’s MFP solution is not only robust and comprehensive but also flexible to cater to small retailers as well as big enterprises. This scalability ensures that as your business grows, Blue Sky’s solution evolves to meet your expanding requirements.
Why Choose Blue Sky?
Future-proof solution – Blue Sky’s team members have 25+ years of tier 1-3 retail best practice experience and tier 1-3 solution capabilities to build optimal processes that scale, yet fit smaller businesses efficiently. Our solutions are built based on our global retail industry best practice experience adopted to smaller retailers in processes, scalability, and price.
Complementary solutions in our portfolio are seamlessly integrated with each other, such as our Forecasting as a Service (FaaS) and our MFP. Our FaaS utilizes a sophisticated forecasting method that produces highly accurate predictions (e.g.: mid- to long-horizon of 6+ month forecast, including for seasonal merchandise) on all channels and retail verticals.
Blue Sky’s cloud-based MFP solution provides a seamless, integrated approach to merchandise financial planning. By addressing common challenges such as labor-intensive processes, version control issues, and siloed data views, Blue Sky empowers retailers to achieve greater efficiency and profitability.
Learn more about Blue Sky’s Merchandise Financial Planning by visiting our Merchandise Financial Planning page.
Contact us to learn more about how our solutions can improve your retail operations.