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•Article: Merchandise Planning

Spend enough time in retail and you will be convinced that people at corporate do not share a company picnic. Nor do they collaborate outside their corporate silos with the people driving store operations. And vice versa. This phenomenon represents the deep-seated dichotomy in retail, the "us versus them" syndrome fundamentally driving inefficiencies and discontinuities throughout all business processes.

The presence of function-oriented silos within the retail enterprise is profoundly entrenched. Even within corporate: marketers market, merchants merchandise, planners plan, allocators allocate, loss preventers prevent … and so on. The silos exist at the store level as well. Criteria that drives and motivates people within one silo is fundamentally different than other silos in the retail organization.

For years, the software industry has put in tremendous efforts to "help" retailers. This aid arrived in the form of point solutions with narrowly defined process and procedural boundaries. Essentially, these solutions were not created to bridge the silos. Consider labor scheduling applications. These applications were "best-in-class" for the goals they had set forth to achieve, such as decreasing payroll costs – however, they did not break down the barriers between corporate and stores.

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•Article: Merchandise Planning

Eric Olafson
President and Chief Executive Officer
Eric is focused on the ongoing development of the business and direction of the retail-in-realtime vision. Eric has an extensive background in systems development, marketing and sales organizations, the past fifteen years of which have focused on the retail market. He is a leading proponent of the thin-client revolution in retail and has been extensively quoted in industry and trade journals. In 2001 Eric was named the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year®.