Lawson Debuts New Inventory-Replenishment Tool

Retailers now have another piece of technology to help them keep their store racks fresh.

St. Paul, Minn.–based Lawson Software has released a software application designed to manage the entire product assortment and store-replenishment process.

The Lawson Assortment Replenishment Planner was developed especially for the apparel and sewn-products industry, which calls for fast turns and quick reaction. The replenisher works in conjunction with Lawson’s M3 enterprise system and helps manage all aspects of inventory management, including defining and introducing new collections, planning store assortments and executing merchandise buy plans and store push plans, and managing store-inventory replenishment.

Lawson is currently beginning the first implementation of the Assortment Replenishment Planner with a major European retailer.

“The fashion-brand owners we work with identify assortment and replenishment planning as one of their top business challenges,” said Andrew Dalziel, marketing director for Lawson Software.

“[This] fills a large gap in the retailing experience.”

Fashion-brand owners usually have many different spreadsheets and software systems to plan their assortments and manage their stores, explained Dalziel. With different store groups taking different combinations of styles, colors and sizes, it can be a timeconsuming and broken process, he said.

“The Assortment Replenisher addresses these concerns through one software system that can build the right assortment plans, push plans and inventoryreplenishment plans, helping to maximize the fashion-brand owner’s overall sell-through rates.”

It can ultimately help improve a fashion-brand owner’s ability to ensure the right product mix to achieve more sales at the full ticket price and monitor performance for a particular store, collection or product, Dalziel added. The new application makes it simpler for a fashion-brand owner to maximize profits with a reduction in store stock-outs, markdowns and obsolete inventory and enables fashion-brand owners to make smarter decisions regarding assortment and replenishment planning for current and future collections.

A number of prospective and existing customers are taking a look at the new tool, and contracts are expected to be signed shortly. In the meantime, the company has signed Hong Kong dress-shirt specialist TAL, to use M3’s planning workbench and Supply Chain Order solutions.

These tools are expected to help TAL achieve shorter planning and production lead times, respond faster to market trends and improve inventory management.

“We used to rely on Excel spreadsheets for mid- to longterm– capacity planning, but it was time-consuming, not integrated and susceptible to human error,” said Delman Lee, director of technology for TAL. “With the Planning Workbench, whether it is the sales team loading orders or the planners balancing capacity, all changes are immediately updated for everyone to see. We also saved time. For 200,000 orders, we used to take eight hours to download and sort data with Excel, but it can be done in 30 minutes now.”

Lee said the Supply Chain Order application helps in the event that if a customer’s order changes, all other related material-requirement orders are taken care of. “We estimate that this gives us 80 percent savings in time spent on these tasks,” added Lee.

OptiTex Adds Adam - OptiTex Ltd. next month will add Adam, a male virtual mannequin, or “avatar,” to its 3-D CAD and design-software systems.

Beginning in November, Adam will appear within OptiTex’s 3-D and Version 10 3-D modules and related applications, serving as a complement to Jasmine, the software’s female equivalent, as well as a family of boy, girl and baby avatars.

Adam’s feature set expands on the previous versions of OptiTex’s 3-D male models. Users will be able to enter key measurements and manipulate characteristics such as muscle-tone definition, belly shape and a wide range of postures to create an Adam, which will then model clothing and conduct fit simulations.

Aside from reducing iterations in the patternmaking process, the avatar can also be used for virtual fashion shows and other uses.

“Virtually every parameter of the avatars is customizable, allowing designers to see their creations come to life on the screen, virtually eliminating the expense of models and fabric waste and significantly reducing production time,” said Ran Machtinger, chief executive officer of OptiTex Ltd.