Multi-Channel Planning: You'll Love the View

Multi-Channel Planning is a module within the Manhattan Associates' Planning and Forecasting suite that gives you enterprise-wide visibility to what's happening in each channel.

Multi-Channel Planning greatly expands your profit potential because multi-channel shoppers spend four times more than single-channel shoppers. Capitalizing on a multi-channel strategy, therefore, is essential to the health of every retailer's business.

But that's tough to do when senior executives, lacking a holistic view, have to review performance to plan on a channel by channel basis, or lack the tools to manage individual channels effectively. Focusing on each channel often obscures focusing what is happening at the enterprise level. For example, management may not detect that customer service improvements in one channel are eroding customer service in another channel, or that a hot seller in one channel causes another to be out of stock.

Now, with one solution, you can plan and track individual channels and see a consolidated plan for all channels so you can effectively manage inventory at an enterprise level. Multi-Channel Planning's flexible architecture combines channels' specific structures, attributes and planning metrics with the ability to analyze and plan across channels when you need to.

Get the Big Picture without Unwieldy Spreadsheets

To facilitate collaboration and leverage company-wide benefits, Manhattan Planning aggregates and allocates planning information through all levels of your organization for combination of products, channels and time.

Until now, our customers who wanted to achieve anything remotely this ambitious had to resort to laborious manipulation of error-prone spreadsheets. With Manhattan's Planning solutions, planners can continually make on-the-fly refinements to any planning metric and see the impact immediately across a multi-dimensional combination of categories, channels and time periods. This ability to quickly consolidate "what-if" scenarios and reforecast at all levels of business ensures inventory is aligned with demand trends, minimizes the need for markdowns and helps management track enterprise-wide profitability.

Explore the Planning and Forecasting process - click the diagram below for an interactive approach to understanding Manhattan's solution.

Close solution diagram pf_graph
  • Multi Channel Planning Whitepaper Why You Can't Treat a Catalog Like a Store.
  • Planning and Forecasting - Solution Brochure Predictive and scientific solutions to optimize business across all channels
  • Staples Moves to the Head of the Class with Multi-Channel Planning. Due to its rapid growth, Staples launched an ambitious IT initiative and selected Manhattan Associates' Advanced Planning to provide a single, integrated solution to serve multiple business units and sales channels. Since implementation, Staples has achieved "one version of the truth" in its planning processes by eliminating hundreds of individual spreadsheets and diminishing ad hoc decision-support systems. With increased efficiencies, the company has freed up an additional half day per week for forecast analysis. It has shortened in-season re-forecasting cycles from one month to one week. And inventory turns have also jumped 25 basis points on Staples' supply chain scorecard.

Read more

Contact Information: To learn more about Manhattan Associates' supply chain solutions, simply complete the information request form, and we will contact you. For North & South America, call +1 877.596.9208 or e-mail info_americas@manh.com. For global inquiries, call +44 (0)1344 318000 or e-mail info_global@manh.com.