Mothercare

Knowing the company
The iconic Mothercare Group is synonymous with parenting. As well as its retail brands, Mothercare and Early Learning Centre (ELC), the company has established a popular social networking site, Gurgle.com, which offers useful advice to new parents.

Combined, Mothercare and ELC have 405 UK retail outlets as well as their respective web stores and mail order operations. The Group has also achieved phenomenal international success, expanding into 51 countries through 609 franchises or joint ventures.

The Group's success has been underpinned by a consistent reputation for specialism, local knowledge, quality, value and availability across its multi-channel, multi-national and multi-cultural shopping structure.

Defining the strategy
Sustaining this reputation through future expansion will be essential to the Group's continued profitability and ability to attract new partners as well as customers - a challenge that has significantly intensified with the company's recent overseas activities.

While the UK's operations bucked the recession in FY09 to post a healthy 6.9% sales increase, its international sales grew a phenomenal 40.9% in the same period, with 115 new stores joining the Group. By the end of FY10, Mothercare plans to open a further 100 international stores.

Mothercare recognised that such multi-national, multi-channel growth would be impossible to manage with its aging legacy systems and increasingly unwieldy spreadsheets.

Choosing the solution
In particular, the Group identified the urgent need for an extensive, flexible sourcing capacity planning solution, supported by direct supply chains, which would optimise merchandise availability. This needed to support the various territorial and channel demands while enabling head office to tightly control distribution costs and limit wastage.

After thoroughly examining its options, the Group elected to install Torex Merchandise Planning. ELC UK already used the previous version of this system and Mothercare had been impressed with its functionality.

The Torex solution's Pre Season Planning module was introduced first to Mothercare's UK operation and two franchise partners.

In the next phase Mothercare is rolling out the solution to all its international franchise partners. After that, the company plans to roll out further Torex modules for: In Season Planning, WSSI and Assortment Planning, before upgrading ELC onto the same platform to gain further crossoperational efficiencies.

Jas Virdee, Mothercare, said, "Our reputation and expansion plans depend on our ability to place the quality of products that our customers expect in the right country and right channel to suit their demands. While doing this, we also need to tightly control our sourcing costs so that we can continue to offer our customers best value. Achieving this on a multi-national, multi-channel scale is only possible with an extremely robust and flexible system that has been designed to support the many, varying business demands that our multifaceted retail operation faces. We also needed the advice and support of an experienced supplier who understood our business.

"Our initial phases confirm that we've found such a solution and partner in Torex."

Achieving results now
Once fully rolled out, the Torex solution will mark a vast improvement in capacity planning for the UK based Sourcing team. By removing the reliance on spreadsheets and knowledge in people's heads, the system will make the whole process far more efficient and consistent, reducing administrative headaches and enabling improved responsiveness to market conditions.

With the Torex solution, Mothercare will be able to draw on historical trading data, and automatically accommodate known local and seasonal variations to more accurately forecast how much of each product it will need at each of its outlets.

This means it will be able to reliably satisfy its customers' expectation of having the right product in the right place at the best price, while limiting wastage.

Jas Virdee concluded, "The consistency, accuracy and efficiency we've already achieved with Torex has given us the confidence to continue with our very ambitious expansion plans."