For more then 30 years, fashion-forward consumers have shopped at trendy Melrose stores, which operate under United Fashions of Texas (UFOT). UFOT focuses on the local needs and tastes of young Hispanic women, offering accessories and apparel for juniors, misses, plus sizes and maternity segments.
The San Antonio, Texas-based woman's apparel chain, which operates 85 stores throughout Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, wanted to maintain its competitive edge and keep pace with company growth. UFOT sought to integrate its merchandising operations with a single platform that would provide more visibility and support its established business processes.
Using its previous planning product, UFOT could only drill down to view a handful of attributes -- company, department and class -- and history was only maintained at store and class level.
"A few years ago we were working with some older software products that didn't offer us the opportunity to drill down to the level of detailed information that we needed," says Tom Ellison, merchandise planning and allocation manager, UFOT. "Having the right infrastructure to support the company's growth was a concern, and moving forward we wanted to retain our existing data, achieve better reporting and add more robustness to our overall planning process. Basically, we needed more and better ways to leverage our data."
UFOT evaluated 30 different retail software products before selecting the Epicor Retail software suite, which includes merchandising, planning, sales audit and warehouse management.
Since implementation, the retailer has streamlined operations, improved productivity, planning and data visibility, increased speed and accuracy of stock flow from receiving to store shelves and improved sales audit efficiency and reporting.
"Using the Epicor Retail application, we can view company, department, sub-department, class, sub-class components -- all the way down to a particular style," says Ellison. "Because of this visibility and the amount of data we retain, we can look at anything we want to -- and at any level -- down to the store, style or color level for any specified period of time."
UFOT also uses Epicor Retail Sales Audit to balance sales with deposits as well as identify any missing transactions, cash shortages and credit out of balances. Epicor's exception reporting allows potential problems to be quickly identified and corrected.
"The new solution gives us more ability and visibility from a sales audit perspective," says Ellison. "Without it, we would've needed at least one additional person at this point, with future team additions as our growth continues. However, using Epicor's system, we can now audit 85 stores with only one person. We've cut time spent
in this area by a tremendous amount. It's phenomenal."
UFOT deploys Epicor Retail Merchandising to analyze, order, price and distribute merchandise, which according to Ellison, gives this small company the opportunity to manage big. "Let's face it -- today we're small, we're lean, we're mean -- and so we're just touching the surface in this area when it comes to functionality," says Ellison. "The amount of things we can do with Epicor Retail Merchandising will only be limited by our imagination. The product is scalable to support our growth now and well into the future."
UFOT relies on Epicor Retail Planning to keep business moving forward during the good and bad times. "In the bad times, when it gets tough such as it's been for the last 18 months and for the foreseeable future, you need to understand what drives your business," says Ellison. "This product gives us greater visibility, greater retention and a more granular level view of our business to determine what to do and where to go next."
According to Ellison, the retailer's future plans include adding men's, boy's and children's apparel to its newer strip center stores and expand its stores base in 2009. |
