Cognos has announced Jeans West has standardised on Cognos to maximise retail sales early in the fashion cycle and extend similar performance measures out to other areas of the organisation.

Jeans West is known as one of Australia most recognisable fashion brands. It has some 220 stores across both countries selling its own branded jeans and clothing, and has recently launched a range of clothing developed in conjunction with Tsubi.

Until recently, the company says it relied on a series of spreadsheets kept at varying management levels and geographical areas for performance tracking and measurement across a number of indicators, including sales and profit against budget, employee turnover and product delivery times from suppliers.

This led to fragmented access to data and reports from systems that lacked the capability to provide more detailed information, for example, on sales at a particular retail store for a specific pair of jeans or colour of belt, to regional, state and executive management. This information is critical to achieving targets and maximising opportunities in the sales cycle.

“We have six turns in our fashion cycle per year, so in womens’ wear an item is literally in stores one week and out ten weeks later, thirteen weeks later for menswear. It’s critical that we get the items to perform in the first weeks of the cycle because we start to miss the opportunities near the end as stock goes on sale, resulting in a loss of margin,” explains Patrick Aldred, IT Applications Manager at Jeans West.

After evaluating several solutions, Jeans West selected Cognos PowerPlay Web and Visualizer due to its intuitive nature and Cognos’ ability to deliver the full solution within four weeks.

Since implementing Cognos, Jeans West claims to have achieved increased visibility over information for decision-making.

“With Cognos, executive managers can view high-level key performance indicators on how the overall business is trending, and state and regional managers can track territory and day-to-day fluctuations in retail store performance,” says Aldred.

“In addition, planners can easily track clothing size information and query key stores to ensure there is available stock in the right sizes at the right time.”

http://www.cognos.com/au/

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