Retail Hero: Your concern should be not how long and comprehensive a report is. You need reports that are brief and effective. You don't have time for niceties - you need to know what is really happening in your stores and what is going to take to correct it, change it, expand it or eliminate it. Anyone can gather information. Success is when the information is converted into ideas that you can use. Let's use the following benchmarks to assess the state of business intelligence in your retail organization. Your system must:
- Provide reports that can help you to motivate your employees
- Report on sales by SKU, category and store
- Generate customized reports unique to your business
- Incorporate customer profile preferences with on-order and received merchandise reports
- Help you in creating reports containing the information and in format you want
- Handle entire layaway process including knowing how much inventory is laid away, when reminders need to be sent out, being able to inform customers of price adjustments and knowing when merchandise should be placed back in stock
- Generate style or vendor alerts
- Generate GMROII (Gross Margin Return on Inventory Investment) report by total store or vendor, category or department
- Provide sophisticated retail business intelligence like “Open-To-Buy” reporting
If your POS system doesn’t support these features or you are having a problem working with your system it is no good for anyone - your customers, employees, you and the life of your business. It means you're making blind decisions. Look from another perspective - succession. Who will want to invest into a business where decisions are made by chance or intuition? The potential buyers - as well as various lenders, business partners, vendors and even customers - appreciate business intelligence of your business where you make educated and less intuitive decisions. Intelligent reporting can help with that. Check it out now - before you still have time until the receivers snatch that computer keyboard from under your fingers.
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