Press Kit Enhanced Retail Solutions. Copyright 2016

Transcription

1 Press Kit

2 Dear Media Representative, Enhanced Retail Solutions is about to be the very first in the field of retail analytics and demand planning (our clients include WWE, JCPenney, RadioShack, irobot and Weatherproof) to introduce software using an advanced expert system (AI) to create/adapt its reporting based on the current data as well as user's preference and behavior. Our cloud based system learns with each interaction so that next time reporting is presented it is more in line with how the user wants to see it. This is similar to how Google Now and Pandora work and is truly groundbreaking for a niche market. It just might make current POS and Demand Planning reporting obsolete. No other company has the depth of experience in retail (store management, buying), manufacturing (import production, costing, forecasting), POS reporting and demand planning to create the libraries necessary for such software. Not only do we have a team of consultants who do the same work as our clients, we have conducted classes and written on the subject (Our Primer is available on Amazon and on our website). Please take a moment to review the enclosed press kit and let us if you would like to learn more about our company and our new paradigm in reporting. David Matsil, President of Business Development Tel: x103 I Mobile: dmatsil@ers-c.com

3 Please visit: For MS Word version of Press Kit along with full content including camera ready artwork. For Enhanced Retail Solutions Overview Booklet:

4 Table of Contents Company info & Mission Statement Experience Our Clients Page Our Area of Specialization Recent Company History Highlights Key Associates Breaking News for Our Vertical at NRF Sample News Story Recent Press Publications & Articles Company Press Releases Case Studies Contact page Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page Page 12 Page 13 Page Page 18 Page Page 23

5 Mission Statement Enhanced Retail Solutions objective is to simplify and expedite the art of Business Analysis, leading to greater sales, increased profit, and improved inventory productivity. Company Information Enhanced Retail Solutions was founded in 2002 by a group of retail veterans who saw a fundamental shift occurring between retailers and their vendor partners. In today s environment retailers demand more from suppliers, particularly when it comes to the management and financial accountability of merchandise programs including inventory forecasting, demand planning, and sales analysis. While this can be a challenging prospect for suppliers, we at Enhanced Retail Solutions empower our customers to turn these obstacles into opportunities with our software, tools and consulting services.

6 Experience Enhanced Retail Solutions collectively has well over 100 years of retail buying, store management and consulting experience across many verticals including: apparel accessories home textile home décor furniture housewares toys jewelry cosmetics/hba consumer packaged goods shoes hard goods/home improvement crafts grocery food licensing retail

7 A Few Of Our Clients

8 AREA OF SPECIALIZATION Streamlining retail sell through analysis with actionable results through the integration of domain expertise, outside data - such as market studies, geographics, demographics, weather - and software. Optimizing wholesale inventory and retail distribution to maximize sales, profits and productivity. Assisting introduction of new brands and products at retail based upon creative and analytical concepts. Business Intelligence and custom software applications for retailers and manufacturers. Sourcing and Production Planning software to create and manage forecasts from country and supplier level down to the program and item level.

9 An $11,000 consulting project with a toy company generates $250,000 of additional business with one retailer in less than 5 months. ERS begins record of saving apparel companies an average of $65,000/season in markdown dollars. ERS releases new BI tool, Retail Synthesis, as both in house software and Software as a Subscription. ERS consulting enables a leading brand denim supplier to save $100,000+ in markdown dollars. RS helps a client survive the narrowing of vendors at Walmart. Their business has since grown ten-fold. ERS software exposes a flaw in Kmart s replenishment system, revealing 200 doors at Kmart that were sold out. The buyer acts on it with a $200,000 reorder. Two buying departments at Sam s Club set ERS reporting method and layout as department standards. Sears invites ERS client to review their Back to School programs to make them more productive. JCPenney and CVS recommend ERS to their vendors to help their buyers manage the business. Recent History Highlights ERS consulting team deepens its Lowe's expertise: developing reports for a major rep that blows away Lowes buyers and developing pipeline reports to facilitate better wholesale inventory forecasting. GXS and InterTrade Systems joint ventures offer the set up and delivery of EDI 852 POS documents. Planalytics joint venture marries weather data with ERS POS analysis engine. Director Merchandise Operations at Target acknowledges that It is important for vendors to help manage the business and that ERS has the proven ability to help vendors in that effort. Bed Bath and Beyond starts recommending ERS to their vendors to help them with their new Collaborative Forecasting Initiative. Consumer Product companies help determine marketing spends using sales history and demographics. ERS adjusts traiting to help push an additional 150,000 units for home textile client at Walmart. ERS helps 4,000+ store chain resolve forecast and replenishment issues with consulting and software. ERS adds support for almost 20 foreign retailers and currency conversion in its reporting. Bed Bath and Beyond Director of Planning asserts that ERS assisted program is the best roll out in 20 years. The facilitated collaboration offers mutual benefit of consistency to BBB and more accurate forecasts for manufacturer in a very cost and staff efficient manner. ERS readies RetailNarrative.

10 Key Associates at James E. Lewis Founder & Chief Executive Officer As a former JC Penney buyer, Jim managed key categories in Men s, Children s and Home Textiles throughout his 20+ year career. Recognizing a trend that retailer s were increasing their expectations of the supplier base, Jim founded ERS in 2002 to help improve the retail business acumen of suppliers. Jim s expertise includes: retail trends, retail analytics, demand planning, MS SQL, retail and wholesale operations. Jim has been featured in : Jim has conducted seminars at industry associations and tradeshows including For a video of Jim Lewis speaking at University of Florida, please see our YouTube page at: Jim is available for giving direct interviews, providing supporting information for articles, and contributing as a writer to an article.

11 Key Associates at David Matsil President of Business Development With over 30 years of experience providing the Apparel, Textiles, Home Furnishing and other industries with technology solutions, David has a vast working knowledge of CAD, PDM, PLM, ERP, Supply Chain and retail analysis systems. He now help show Retailers, Suppliers and Licensors how to improve sales, profit and inventory productivity. David s expertise includes: Retail Trends, CAD, PDM, PLM, ERP, Supply Chain and retail analytics and demand planning systems. David is available for giving direct interviews, providing supporting information for articles, and contributing as a writer to an article. Josh Coughlin Chief Technology Officer Josh s background is focused around the apparel industry, a key market for ERS. He was the lead developer and business analyst for Sales- Aware, an SAAS company that provided services and software, and for Retail Analytics. More recently, Josh worked for an apparel company supplying mass and mid-tier retailers as VP of Operations in charge of Logistics, Product Development and Production Cycle. Josh s expertise includes development, retail and wholesale operations, project management, sourcing, testing, product development. Greg Bailey Director of Business Process & Implementation Paul Warren VP, Director of Consulting With 21 years experience as a technologist, project manager and business process liaison at JCPenney, Greg led an initiative with ERS at JCPenney to build and implement a supplier planning and forecasting system for their Strategic Sourcing division. He now continues to provide process and project management support to further enhance this software. Greg s expertise includes retail operations, project management, sourcing, testing. With his research background in history studies and experiences amalgamating information from dozens of inputs, Paul brings technical expertise and a perspective unique to trend analysis to the company. Paul graduated from the College of Arts and Sciences at New York University with a major in History and minor in Economics. Paul s expertise includes retail analytics, demand planning, trend analysis, statistics, Retail Link, Retail portals, project management.

12 Breaking News for Our Vertical at NRF Enhanced Retail Solutions is about to be the very first in the field of retail analytics and demand planning (our clients include WWE, JCPenney, RadioShack, irobot and Weatherproof) to introduce software using expert systems and artificial intelligence. It scours - on a continuing basis - millions of rows of Retail Point of Sale and Inventory data to find the most important trends for enhanced predictive decision making. It also adapts its reporting based on the data and a user's preference. This is similar to how Google Now and Pandora work and is truly groundbreaking for our market. Please contact us to set an appointment at NRF (Booth 257): David Matsil President of Business Development Tel: x103 Mobile: dmatsil@ers-c.com

13 Sample news story: Enhanced Retail Solutions To Unveil New Paradigm for Reporting at NRF Retail s Big Show at the Javits Center, January This new software makes use of an AI Expert System to scour - on a continuing basis - millions of rows of Retail Point of Sale and Inventory data - to find the most important trends for enhanced predictive decision making Enhanced Retail Solutions (ERS), a top provider of consulting and software solutions to the retail industry and their suppliers and licensors for use in analyzing their products' retail sales and trends as well as improving inventory productivity has announced groundbreaking functionality to its Intelligent Retail Platform. ERS has been enabling the individual user to create the reports the way they want them - As opposed to relying on canned or a limited range of customized reports. But those without planning background do not know where to look or what to do with the information. Planners who dig into the details could still miss important detail buried in millions of rows of data. ERS harnessed many years of consulting experience and actionable reporting to create a SAAS offering called RetailNarrative, which complements its ad hoc /best practice and demand planning reporting. The software will comb through data, asking the questions their consultants would to present to the user the most actionable pieces of information in dashboard with a concise narrative explaining what the user is looking at. Using ERS robust forecasting engine, RetailNarrative can suggest when and how much inventory to buy. The software learns as it goes, revising its understanding of trends, finding the most actionable information for the week and adjusting to the user s preferences. It is truly virtual eyes sifting through sku-store combinations to find low-level and high-level recommendations. Because it sifts through the data in the background all the results have already been derived. When the user opens the dashboard, their selections and interactions are instant. While the software is geared to the Retail Industry, the software is built in such a way that - with the right domain expertise - actionable information can be generated from any Data Set (Small to Big ). According to Chief Software Architect Josh Coughlin: People with experience don t have the time and the people with the time don t have the experience to effectively utilize Retail Point of Sales and Demand Planning data leaving unrealized sales and profit gains. Our system will ask all the right domain specific questions of the data, score the answers of those questions, and produce the top actionable items that could directly affect your business, says Jim Lewis, CEO of Enhanced Retail Solutions, No other company can offer that.

14 Recent Press Publications & Articles

15 Electronic Commerce Meets Omni-channel By Ann Grackin. Nov 4 th, 2015 So our next speaker, David Matsil, President of Sales and Marketing at Enhanced Retail Solutions, spoke about how to leverage the information from communications and commerce for better supply chain planning and forecasting. As Matsil made clear, most companies have many data assets that they don t leverage to create inventory and replenishment plans. And often they don t capture their trading partners available data. Good enough is not going to make it today, he challenged the audience. Optimistically, he also pointed out that today, unlike years ago, executives are much more open to listen to a tech provider s advice. David said that he no longer hears from prospects and customers, Don t tell me how to run my business. Rather, execs know that the world is changing and they need to learn and change to keep up and that tech companies have a role to play in helping them.

16 Enhanced Retail Solutions Announces New Retail Link Capabilities in its Intelligent Retail Software Platform Dynamic treatment of Instocks offers an even faster, easier and more interactive experience than Retail Link October 20, 2015 Enhanced Retail Solutions (ERS), a leading provider of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) retail analytic and demand planning solutions to suppliers, their retail trading partners and licensors announced an enhancement to the replenishment tracking capabilities within its Intelligent Retail Software Platform. The terminology used within the software will be familiar to anyone who has used Walmart's Retail Link before, and the concepts are the same at other retailers as well. Users have long been able to upload, store, and view whether their stores are traited and valid within ERS Retail Sales Analysis Software. This ensures they knew which stores are carrying a program during any given week of selling. Filtering out stores or items that are not part of a replenishment program is a key to quickly and accurately fulfill the duties as a vendor (or retailer) when forecasting sales, directing inventory to stores, and general management of a program. The newest additions provide ERS customers with the ability to dynamically calculate and store historical Instocks: from detailed store-sku level, to department level and even to retailer company level. This information has always been available when using numerical filters for on hand with some additional formulas on the Excel output. Now it can be provided as a calculated column in reports themselves, which can be measured against either the total active stores, or Instocks for traited stores only. The new capabilities now show top level Instock reports at the executive summary level by department. A user can also choose to quickly drill down to a result that identifies which items or stores are driving their Instock problems. They can also now provide a weekly exception report of stores that are out of stock and need replenishment, as well as answers to many other detailed replenishment questions. Pivot table reports summarizing Instocks at any level can be set up to track progress over the course of the last 13 weeks, month by month, or even year over year. "We decided to save our customers the pain of doing this extra work themselves" said Paul Warren, VP and Director of Consulting at Enhanced Retail Solutions.

17 COLLABORATIVE SUCCESS BY THE NUMBERS By Ann Meyer. September 2015 Issue "The fact we are a neutral and quasi-neutral party helps, and the fact we've built up all this expertise across so many different areas [means that] we almost instinctively know what the goals are," says David Matsil, president of business development at New York-based Enhanced Retail Solutions, a provider of retail analytic and demand planning solutions for suppliers and retailers. The company offers software-as-a-service as well as consulting. "We serve a whole ecosystem. We both work with retailers and suppliers and their licensors, so that gives us a nice 360-degree view of the industry and helps us with insights that our clients wouldn't necessarily have," Matsil says. By helping customers understand the analytics and act on the information, Enhanced Retail Solutions boasts a return on investment of 6,500 percent, Matsil says: "For every dollar they spend, they get $66 back in increased sales or increased profits."

18 DECEMBER 22, 2015 AUGUST 18, 2015 Enhanced Retail Solutions Announces Addition of Ten New Features to Its Retail Business Intelligence Platform Press Releases Enhanced Retail Solutions Announces Major Enhancements to Retail Store Replenishment/Allocation Software Module SEPTEMBER 15, 2015 Enhanced Retail Solutions CEO Jim Lewis Joins Executive Advisory Board Miller Center for Retailing Education and Research

19 Case Studies Please see in-depth details on Case Studies in the full version of our Press Kit online

20 Bed Bath & Beyond Collaborative Forecasting At any retailer - from Walmart down to independently owned single store entities - there exists only so much time to accurately predict sales and inventory needs for any particular SKU. So it is not unusual for the retailer to rely on their vendors to fill this gap. However, the vendor does not always have the analytical expertise in house to provide this need, and the ERS consulting team and software was able to provide the comprehensive resources and develop a first in class Vendor Managed Inventory program, as in this case with BBB. The process of building this relationship relied on establishing a multitude of data repositories and forecasting parameters agreed upon by BBB and the vendor, allowing us to blend information into a more robust and accurate understanding of both the demand and production sides. Once these factors have been loaded, the crux of the VMI relationship can begin as the vendor has time to intricately normalize factors like seasonality, lost sales, orders that may have been late or incompletely fulfilled, assign a weeks of supply model for each SKU, etc. All of these elements were handled with ERS s own forecasting software suite, and then augmented with our consulting expertise to analyze the result and make adjustments. The end result was that the vendor was went above and beyond good enough that it is now a star in the eyes of BBB. Automation of many of these processes by using the ERS software suite decreased the number of manual inputs that increase room for user error. The return of value was seen monetarily as well with an increase in sales of $360,000 at cost dollars. Additionally, by properly flowing out the receipts we anticipate will save $10,000 in freight, warehouse and handling costs. Case Study

21 Home Depot and Lowe s Strengthening Home Improvement Retailer Programs Through Door Level Weekly Sales and Inventory Report Consulting A leading global provider of innovative cleaning supplies with longstanding programs at Home Depot found that their wholesale inventory was being caught off guard by seemingly erratic purchasing. Not only that, but they suspected that goods were not being distributed to the doors that need them most. They determined that they needed a tool that provided the ability to not only forecast the flow of purchases by analyzing the POS data at a store level, but also provide a map of which doors were being chronically undersupplied. ERS then set about creating a customized tool to deal with the intricacies of Home Depot distribution channels to help manage DC level inventory needs which could switch between flowing through overarching Transload DCs or bespoke Regional DCs, all assigned to specific stores whose needs could vary dramatically from item to item. The end result rolled up store-sku level POS sales, and provided a twelve month forecast at the RDC, Transload, and item level which was organized and color coded by need to identify priorities and future inventory exposures. The tool created a resumption of smoother wholesale inventory flows, gave greater visibility of where exposure to unexpected orders would be, the ability to identify store/dc execution issues, and resulted in savings of $2 million dollars between realized sales and revised inventory purchases. It also had the added benefit of impressing the Home Depot team of our client s expertise, and eventually adding 100 s of doors that our client was able to sell goods in. Case Study

22 Target Retail Analytics Software to Develop and Build Brand A global childrenswear manufacturer markets both national and private brand products in department and mid-tier stores. The manufacturer used our retail analytics consulting services to identify an opportunity which resulted in the launch of a $30 million hybrid brand at Target. The efforts of the manufacturer with Enhanced Retail Solutions demand planning consulting generated success from the developmental stage through monitoring of the program execution. ERS used its retail analytics software to monitor retail performance and provide the retailer with actionable recommendations and demand planning consulting to constantly improve their business. In the end, the launch surpassed the goals and expectations of both Target and the manufacturer due to the use of innovative methods derived from Enhanced Retail Solutions analytics, and demand planning software and consulting services. Case Study

23 Corporate Office 214 West 39 th St., New York, NY enhancedretailsolutions.com l (212) New York, USA Dallas, USA Cork, Ireland New Delhi, India