business planning

BUSINESS PLANNING ALIGNS DEVELOPMENT

WITH BOTTOM-LINE BUSINESS GOALS.
Plans based on facts, not “guesstimates.”

Making Data-driven Business Planning a Reality.

Centric Business Planning helps the product and finance teams come together CENTRIC
to manage seasons, departments, collections and even specific styles to BUSINESS PLANNING
meet performance targets. Business Planning extends senior management’s
visibility to the full life cycle of business plans, from initial line plan proposal
through sales commitments and recording of actual results. Visibility into costs, Enhance the entire team’s ability to meet
targets and achieve success.
margins, sales targets and overall performance provides ability to review and
compare plans, top-down or bottom-up. Establish Top-down Goals
• Set performance targets directly from
The result? Profitability improves through enhanced visibility and planning of corporate goals and initiatives.
sales targets and performance, costs and gross margins. Managers can direct • Track targets across brands,
efforts toward products with the greatest impact on revenue, and focus their divisions and lines.
teams on GMROI, volume targets and other key objectives. • Make timely product drop decisions
with visibility into hard and
opportunity costs.
Built to Deliver Value. Fast. • Establish placeholders that
capture revenue targets, and allow
Centric 8 PLM delivers real value in 4–6 months, and often sooner. Centric 8 development to flush out style
incorporates business processes and best practices critical to the needs of the details.
apparel, retail, footwear, luxury and consumer goods industries. An intuitive, Make Bottom-up Estimates Throughout
easy-to-use interface engages users and encourages user adoption. the Development Process
• Capture sales estimates by price,
Centric’s Agile DeploymentSM implements the configurable—vs. customizable—
volume and distribution channel.
Centric 8 PLM system through an iterative implementation process that • Combine sales estimates with
gets users up and running three to nine times faster than a typical PLM vendor/supplier cost detail to
implementation. And when combined with other Centric 8 modules, Business calculate GMROI and GMROI by
Planning’s benefits extend beyond the department or workgroup, to the entire style, collection, brand and more.
extended enterprise. Link Plans to Actual Performance
• Capture actual performance from
ERP or POS systems.
• Analyze actual performance versus
beginning of season top-down
goals, order commitments, or sales
forecasts.
• Feed actual performance data into
future development processes.

Use Flexible Analytics

• Eliminate the need for expensive
business intelligence systems.
• Capture and analyze volume
estimates by channel.
• Drill down easily to identify outliers
that impact performance.

Margin threshold quickly identifies underperforming styles.

Centric Business Planning

Decisions Based on This Season’s Data With Insights From Last Season.

Today, staying competitive means actively managing brands, getting trend-right products to market quickly, shortening product cycle
times, and increasing productivity throughout the supply chain. Centric 8 Business Planning speaks directly to these requirements—and
the bottom line—by allowing design teams to focus on the styles that promise the greatest impact on revenue.
Centric 8 Business Planning replaces disparate processes and information scattered throughout the organization and draws on Centric 8’s
current, up-to-date, “single version of the truth about the product.” Business Planning’s Excel-like dashboard captures top-down business
goals and bottom-up estimate roll-ups. Quick comparisons of goals vs. estimates vs. actuals assure that product drop decisions and
project plans stem from real numbers, not hunches.
Business Planning provides the visibility to keep managers and product teams aligned with business goals. Collaboration becomes reality.

Centric Business Planning FEATURES

• Use Target and Forecast planning buckets and Committed and Actual execution data to configure and analyze business markets.
• Create holistic merchandising plans from tops, bottoms, footwear, accessories or any other style.
• Refer to styles from any season to support new-to-market or carry-over products.
• Link Target and Forecast planning buckets to sourcing libraries, or incorporate actual sell-through data by linking to ERP/POS.
• Incorporate currency and exchange rate definition
• Leverage placeholder products to allow planning work to begin/continue before actual style development starts.

Centric Business Planning BENEFITS

• Make timely product drop decisions throughout product development, based on current design performance data, not
“guesstimates” from prior seasons.
• Improve success rates by directing efforts toward products with highest potential for success.
• Provide precise merchandising guidance to help design teams develop styles that reflect trends and buying patterns.
• Avoid “over-development” of products with little likelihood of success to reduce overall costs.
• Avoid expensive business intelligence systems.

Centric Software is a leading provider of product lifecycle

management (PLM) software for retail, apparel, footwear, luxury
and consumer goods companies. Centric 8 delivers easy-to-use
functionality to manage critical, inseparable business processes,
including product development, sourcing, business planning, quality
management and collection management, through a modularized
system. Centric’s configurable, out-of-the-box approach implements
and delivers value rapidly with the Agile DeploymentSM methodology.

More information: To learn more or speak with a Centric

representative, call +1.408.574.7802 x399, email centric@
centricsoftware.com, or visit www.centricsoftware.com.
Collection Books, managed easily by merchandising staff,
display the latest product options from the Centric 8 system.

655 Campbell Technology Parkway Suite 200 Campbell CA 95008 USA

T +1.408.574.7802 URL www.CentricSoftware.com
© 2012 Centric Software Inc. All rights reserved.
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