Modell's Sporting Goods

New York based Modell's Sporting Goods, boasting almost 100 stores throughout the north east and mid Atlantic states, needed a merchandising system capable of providing planning.
Merchandisers needed to manage daily inventories to optimize margin and placement of goods in stores based on local demand.

Virtual Strategy implemented an operations based solution integrating point of sale data, inventories, purchase orders, accounts payable, general ledger, and other data sources in an efficient enterprise model. Dynamic scorecards and reports were created to provide merchandising planning and margin capabilities down to the SKU level.l Other features include new product alerts, and on the fly product grouping and analysis.

Virtual Strategy's advanced 'what if' capabilities permit scenarios around product, vendor and other merchandising issues to be examined before decisions are made. In addition, Modell's wanted a more accurate and flexible way to access data on their legacy COBOL systems. Virtual Strategy was able to load from these systems without the need for complex data staging, cleansing tools and provide executives with a simpler more powerful reporting interface for operational data.

"Compared to other competitive products we saved in excess $1M and 18 months on the implementation.. Virtual Strategy built our entire solution during the peak retail season with minimal impact on our staff. The solution has given Modell's unrivaled merchandising capabilities."

- Larry Long, CFO/CAO

BUSINESS NEED:

• Comprehensive Enterprise Information Model
• Ability to rapidly access legacy COBOL data and SQL data sources
• Accurately portray customer and product profitability
• Ability to determine manage margin and planning at all levels
• On the fly product groupings and analysis
  

SOLUTION:

• Extracted mainframe COBOL data without elaborate data stage
• Lowered auto-data loading time from 40 hours to 13 minutes
• Provided capability of tracking profitability down to the SKU level
• Developed merchandise planning models utilizing on the fly product groupings, cross selling, and customer segmentation tools
  

IMPLEMENTATION TIME:

2 months