Retail and consumer services

Apparel concept-to-consumer collaboration

The apparel sector is rapidly evolving to address today’s dizzying pace of change. The concept-to-consumer lifecycle is undergoing a transformation as brands look to gain sustainable competitive advantage through speed-to-market, optimized inventory management, improved flow merchandising and enterprise agility.

In most apparel organizations today, business processes operate in a “silo" manner, where the output from one organizational silo becomes the input to another in a very serial, ineffective and non-collaborative process. Successful transformation requires that the following three core processes operate collaboratively across the retailer divide:

• Supply chain management: Encompasses the business processes and technologies required to accurately assess product demand, development and delivery
• Retail planning: Covers merchandise, assortment, space, as well as price and promotion planning and optimization
• Retail operations: Encompasses lifecycle pricing, cross-channel merchandise execution and store operations

CGI’s Rendezvous solution is an architecture and related platform, supported by tools and services, to assist apparel and footwear brands, retailers and third party partners in advancing collaboration across the concept-to-consumer value chain. From product creation (concept) to customer spend (consumer), Rendezvous supports the collaborative processes required to drive transformative benefits, such as the following:

• Planning product lines to ensure the right products are in the right space and at the right price
• Transitioning line creation from a product-focused to customer-focused process
• Optimizing line creation sourcing and procurement processes
• Elevating the retail brand presentation and experience
• Connecting with consumers in maintaining brand integrity
• Collaborating across key sell-in (wholesale) and sell-thru (retail) processes
• Driving significant supply chain efficiencies