Merchandising means the process of buying and selling of goods. For a footwear and apparel industry it spans across the process which analyses and even forecasts the customer's demand and make customer's buy what they want to sell via efficient product marketing. This involves knowing the present and future fashion trends. What is hot and what is going to be hot. Innovation is the key, but also the customer's spending capacity needs to be considered . Communication between the merchandizers and the marketing is the key for efficient merchandising processes.
Does FlexPLM as a process and data management tool cater to this need of efficient communication. I don't think so.I don't know if there is any software which does this. There needs to be a channel for communication between the fashion merchandizers, marketing team and the product designers so that the creative ideas to be trapped. Fashion Merchandizers are people who creatively display the products in the retail stores and are the people to see the customer's first hand response for the product. For the newly initiated products it could make a great difference if the customer's product response is recorded as early as possible and required changes/enhancements are made. A good idea could be a mobile app for the in store merchandizer to record customer responses in the real time and send it across to the PLM systems and the marketing team.
For the newly initiated products, the placement of the product in the store also makes a lot of difference. The merchandizers should be creative enough to place the NIP (New Initiated product) to attract customer attention. And if possible there can be a tracking device as well which could do this. A camera scanner may be !
Social networking and mobility is changing the way companies are selling their goods. Creating facebook/twitter fan group for a product also helps in capturing customer response.Product performance tracking becomes easier with online selling channel which includes mobile commerce. This implies the need for any enterprise application to extend itself across all channels.
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