Conbipel

Knowing the company
Since 1958, Conbipel Spa has grown from a family run firm based in the Asti province of Northern Italy to become the leading Italian mid-market fashion chain, targeting 35-55 year-olds. Today, it has turnover of €300m, with 150-stores nationwide ranging from 100m2 to 1500m2. It has a loyal customer base, an impressive 93 percent brand recognition rate, and a reputation for quality products, reliable service and a strong Italian heritage.

Defining the strategy
As it expanded, and as market dynamics shifted to pull-demand, coupled with a buyer-led culture and poor cross-organisational visibility, Conbipel felt it had led to inaccurate forecasts and cost-inefficient allocations. This resulted in scenarios such as men's raincoats being carried by all stores, when only half could sell them profitably.

Heavily reliant on spreadsheets, Conbipel were also challenged like a lot of retailers, with a lack of visibility and flexibility to accommodate regional preferences during allocation, or to re-forecast in-season to match actual demand. Consequently, it suffered from having to heavily discount stock and still carried around 10 percent terminal stock.

Conbipel wanted an enterprise-wide solution to help it introduce best practices, gain greater visibility, improve merchandise planning and reduce wastage.

Choosing the solution
Following an assessment of options, Conbipel chose Torex Merchandise Planning to provide a single, integrated process that links all buying and merchandising functions.

Sue Elder, Head of Merchandise & Planning, Conbipel, said, "We chose Torex because its solution is clearly designed by retailers for retailers. The intuitive screens and easily customised workflows made it easy to get going, and automatically gave us best-practice processes to standardise on."

This standardisation enabled Conbipel to establish more effective, collaborative cross-organisational procedures, such as the alignment of B&M (buying & merchandising) product plans with retail store plans.

In stage one, Conbipel focused on its immediate stocking issues. The Torex In-season re-forecasting module (WSSI) provided an ongoing analysable view of stock, sales and intake, which helped Conbipel to constantly adjust sales forecasts, promotions and intake to proactively manage stock levels. This not only optimised profits and reduced wastage but improved trend-tracking, and enabled better control of seasonal transitions.

In stage two, Conbipel 'joined up' pre-season merchandise planning activities such as store planning, clustering and assortment planning. By matching sales potential with available space, stock and historical sales data, the retailer better formulated the width and depth of assortments and allocations to support customer demand throughout its diverse portfolio.

Ms. Elder said, "This was timely as our recent operational review resulted in the redesign of a third of our stores to drive sales growth. The newly visible pre-season option width and depth planning has helped us to optimise this strategy."

Conbipel is now integrating assortment planning with size & pack and ordering, in a centralised system, which replaces a triple data-entry operation with single entry. This will reduce administration and keying errors, freeing up personnel to focus on commercial decisions.

Achieving return on investment
Within a year of installing Torex Merchandise Planning, Conbipel has:

• reduced markdowns and terminal stocks despite volatile trading conditions
• reduced administration, significantly cutting the time taken for in-season re-forecasting and markdown planning.
• created profitable assortments to address local demands

The solution's workflows have also enabled Conbipel to coordinate teams and operations better, and develop a more pull-demand, customer-centric culture.

Ms. Elder said, "As well as strengthening our current position, Torex has given us deeper visibility across the company, integrated our operations and tightened our planning process. This has renewed our confidence to plan long-term business expansion strategies."