Analysis, forecasting and budgeting capabilities enable SMBs to capture business opportunities and improve efficiency
HONG KONG, May 5, 2011 – IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced that Chun Au Knitting Factory Limited (Chun Au), the established garment retailer with the well-known brand “Chicks” (雞仔嘜), has deployed a retail management solution with IBM Cognos software at its core, enhancing its ability to navigate change in the dynamic retail market.
Chun Au, the homegrown garment manufacturer famed for producing its undergarment for more than 70 years, enhanced its popular brand “Chicks” and expanded into the casual wear market in 2003. The move created the need to forecast market trends, have the right products, and ensure optimal inventory control and budgeting.
To sustain retail sales in the dynamic and increasing volatile retail market, Chun Au implemented a sales, marketing and merchandising planning process which required managers to forecast and budget based on a spreadsheet-based approach. The process, which involved manual data entry and calculations across different systems, soon proved to be labor intensive, inefficient and prone to errors and limited Chun Au’s ability to make business-critical decision in a quick and accurate manner.
To address this need for consistent, accurate and efficient access to data, Chun Au turned to a more sophisticated retail management solution built on IBM Cognos and delivered by IBM business partner, Cherubim Enterprise Solutions Limited.
With an IBM Cognos-based full-fledged retail management solution in place, Chun Au’s management team can easily access sales and inventory data from its enterprise systems and Chun Au’s retail outlets. An integrated view of all enterprise data is crucial for sales, marketing and merchandising planning.
Chun Au can analyze customer trends and gain insight into customer perceptions of its store and products, enabling Chun Au to take a more proactive approach to improve top-down, bottom-up planning for merchandise sales, margin and gross profit. The IBM Cognos solution gives Chun Au the ability to build complex scenarios for predicting key decisions outcomes and provides the company with ability to adapt to the ever changing market and capitalize on emerging opportunities.
“The IBM Cognos-based solution is vital for Chun Au to take better control over its stock and conduct accurate sales forecasting. As a result, we can better predict new opportunities, changes and demands, and improve our competitiveness in today’s fast-moving retail market. This is especially important now as we are experiencing exceptional growth since our brand revamp in 2003,” said Robert Tam, Executive Director, Chun Au Knitting Factory Limited.
The solution reduced the amount of time required for analysis significantly, and eliminated the chance of human error. As a result, Chun Au has offloaded 80 percent of the merchandising department’s workload. With improved inventory management, optimal stock-keeping unit (SKU) level, and accurate sales forecasting, Chun Au can maximize the profits with the same level of resources.
“Chun Au now has the ability to quickly gear up to launch marketing campaigns and align its merchandising and inventory resources closely with market needs,” said Ricky Chung, Executive, Software Group, IBM China/Hong Kong Limited. “This is representative of what small and medium businesses are looking for today: the ability to unleash business insights from enterprise data so they can make smarter decisions to drive business success.”
Robert Tam (left), Executive Director, Chun Au Knitting Factory Limited and Ricky Chung, Executive, Software Group, IBM China/Hong Kong Limited announced Chu Au’s successful deployment of Retail Management Solution with IBM Cognos software at its core, enhancing its ability to navigate change in the dynamic retail market.
About IBM
For more information about IBM Hong Kong, go to: www.ibm.com/hk