Manhattan Helps Retailers Plan Product Mix With The Customer in Mind

Planning product continues the evolution of Manhattan's Zero Disappointment Retail™ approach

Atlanta - Novembre 2, 2010 - When a customer shops, they make buying decisions not just on product type, but based on product attributes such as style, brand, color, fabrication and price.. Incorporating these product attributes into the planning process has traditionally proved challenging for many retailers, because it adds another level of detail to their decision making. With the release of Manhattan Associates' (NASDAQ: MANH) Customer Preference Planning, a retailer can now plan the way a customer thinks when they shop in a store, catalog or on a web site. Coupled with the capabilities of Manhattan Associates' Store Clustering and Assortment Planning solutions, which enable assortments to be tailored to match local customer demographics, Customer Preference Planning helps planners optimize their product mix to match consumer preferences in every channel. As a result, both planners and merchants can improve return on investment by matching assortment strategy with customer preferences and financial goals.

"Customer Preference Planning continues the evolution of Manhattan's Zero Disappointment Retail™ approach, which is based on anticipating what a customer wants and providing a single, consistent brand experience across all channels," said Eddie Capel, executive vice president, Global Operations, Manhattan Associates. "This application gives retailers the power to monitor what customers buy and why and leverage this information in their merchandise and assortment planning processes."

With Customer Preference Planning, Manhattan has focused on two key areas in the solution design to ensure that attributes can be easily adopted into a planner's everyday workflow:

• Flexibility: Customer Preference Planning is an optional capability with no additional overhead if the retailer or planner wants to build regular category-based plans. Planners have flexibility to vary the attributes based on the customer preferences for the particular category. For example, in the apparel industry, brand is an important driver for jeans, whereas color or styling may be more important for shirts. With Customer Preference Planning, planners can choose which attributes they want to plan, turn them 'on' or 'off' as needed and change the orientation of their view dynamically in pivot table fashion.
• Usability: Planning attributes like color and supplier is challenging for most retailers due to their sheer numbers within each category. Manhattan Customer Preference Planning allows the planner to select only the attributes they need to plan and the system automatically calculates the balance. For example, if the shirts category has 1,000 suppliers across all products, but 20 percent of them account for 80 percent of the business, the planner can easily focus on the key suppliers and let the solution do the rest, so they are still able to plan the entire category.

"Planning key attributes not only improves usability, but also increases productivity and also improves the performance and scalability of Manhattan's Planning & Forecasting solutions as a whole," said Capel.

Customer Preference Planning is part of Manhattan's Planning & Forecasting solution suite, which allows retailers to create and manage the financial, assortment and promotional plans for each selling channel-and communicate changes across the entire supply chain.

Manhattan Associates' Planning and Forecasting solutions are part of the Manhattan SCOPE® portfolio, which operates on a Supply Chain Process Platform that facilitates interactions among multiple software applications, whether wholly or in part, depending on the specific supply chain goals of each Manhattan customer. Manhattan SCOPE solutions are designed to seamlessly optimize day-to-day processes from one common interface, in real time.

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About Manhattan Associates, Inc.

Manhattan Associates continues to deliver on its 20-year heritage of providing global supply chain excellence to more than 1,200 customers worldwide that consider supply chain optimization core to their strategic market leadership. The company's supply chain innovations include: Manhattan SCOPE® a portfolio of software solutions and technology that leverages a Supply Chain Process Platform to help organisations optimize their supply chains from planning through execution; Manhattan SCALE™, a portfolio of distribution management and transportation management solutions built on Microsoft. NET technology; and Manhattan Carrier™, a suite of supply chain solutions specifically addressing the needs of the motor carrier industry. For more information, please visit www.manh.com.