I currently plan all my assortments in Excel. How easy is it for me to migrate to your solution?
Research indicates that over 80% of retailers today use Excel for assortment planning, including those who already have a merchandise planning application tool. For this reason, daVinci Retail created an interface specifically for Excel users. The baseline daVinci functionality provides Excel users a solution that is, at a minimum, what they have today, only exponentially richer in functionality. A comprehensive planning tool specifically designed for buying, assortment planning, and merchandise planning, daVinci incorporates all planning elements necessary to support your merchandise strategy.
My organization is just now embarking on customer-centric strategies. We are not yet positioned to take advantage of daVinci’s customer-centric aspect of planning assortments. Can we still use daVinci?
Yes. At daVinci Retail, we recognized retailers vary as much in the type of business and strategy as they do in their evolution of customer-centricity. daVinci’s Buy Management System is designed to help each retailer evolve irrespective of where they are in this evolutionary process. Start with what you have today using daVinci Buying or Merchandise Financial Planning; as data mining and business intelligence become available, daVinci is ready to take that knowledge and help you leverage it to execute your strategy.
I use a merchandise planning enterprise solution. Will daVinci work with other merchandising applications?
Yes. One of daVinci’s fundamental philosophies is that planning is at the center of many merchandise processes. For our solutions to be effective, it must integrate seamlessly with other in-house systems such as financial planning, design, purchasing, and allocation. At daVinci Retail, we believe the key to a successful buy management system is to plan concurrently and communicate dynamically with other stakeholders in the planning process, including financial planning. As such, daVinci provides merchants with best-of-breed buying and assortment planning solutions that integrate into your financial planning tool, whether it be Arthur, Oracle, or any other tool.
Can daVinci take sales curves, history and forecasts to help get me started?
Of course. daVinci will seed your plans with any relevant history or forecast to ensure you get the best start possible. For new items, daVinci also gives you the ability to map like-style history or forecast curves. You can read more about our solutions here.
Can I get vendor reports from daVinci?
Yes. daVinci has a wide range of management reporting capabilities. Vendor reporting is a standard report from daVinci, as are many other critical performance monitoring reports. Also, daVinci gives you comprehensive and interactive ad hoc reporting, data consolidation, and visibility across the organization, plus exception monitoring and management reporting capabilities.
We don’t have a lot of IT support. Is daVinci hard to implement?
No. daVinci’s modular application architecture gives retailers of any size the flexibility to implement buying and merchandise planning at their own pace. daVinci’s powerful solutions are grouped into tiers that can be added one layer at a time. Gain immediate ROI and increase buyer and planner productivity without the risk and high upfront cost of the enterprise solution. Start small with daVinci, and add to it as time, resources, and planning sophistication grow.
What databases does daVinci support?
The daVinci Buy Management System suite of products are built using a modular and multi-layered technical architecture to allow for maximum flexibility and scalability. The data layer is database agnostic, which can utilize any of the major relational databases.