Fashion brands and businesses simultaneously manage collections, purchasing, inventory, wholesale, stores, e-commerce, margins, and returns. The data they need is spread across ERP, online stores, point-of-sale systems, EDI, and logistics systems.
We bring this data together so you can better manage collection performance, sell-through, inventory availability, re-orders, discounts, purchasing, and profitability.
A fashion business needs to know more than just what has been sold. You also want to see which collections, items, and colors are performing well, where inventory is sitting idle, and which products are selling out faster than expected. Pre-orders provide an initial indication of expected demand. Consumer sales show what is actually gaining traction and provide the basis for decisions about re-orders, inventory allocation, discounts, and outlet sales.
At the same time, the supply chain must remain manageable. Which purchase orders are delayed, and what does a later arrival mean for available inventory, fulfillment, and revenue? Where do ordered and received quantities differ? Which inventory is freely available, reserved, or has not moved for an extended period? And are the right items available at the right time for wholesale, stores, and e-commerce?
These questions affect different parts of the organization. Merchandising focuses on collections, sell-through, and item performance; buying on suppliers, cost prices, and deliveries; sales on customers, order intake, and re-orders; operations on inventory and logistics; and finance on revenue, margins, budgets, and forecasts.
Information about collections, purchasing, inventory, sales, returns, and finance is spread across the entire supply chain. When this data is not aligned in substance, it becomes difficult to make timely adjustments to the assortment, availability, and margins.
Product information, purchase orders, inventory, wholesale orders, store sales, and online store orders are often held in different systems. As a result, it is not immediately clear how a collection is actually performing, how much inventory is still available, or what revenue or margin is ultimately achieved by item, size, color, channel, or season.
An item may sell quickly to one customer or through one sales channel while the same inventory remains unsold elsewhere. Without a coherent view of pre-orders, consumer sales, reservations, available inventory, and the forecast, it becomes clear too late where stock needs to be reordered, reallocated, or scaled back.
Pre-orders provide an initial indication of expected demand, but consumer sales reveal what is actually gaining traction. When sell-through, returns, and inventory are not monitored together, decisions about re-orders, markdowns, outlet sales, or phasing out an item often come too late.
Gross revenue does not provide a complete picture of sales performance. Returns, discounts, commissions, and other commercial agreements vary by customer, sales channel, and product group. As a result, an item with a high sales volume may ultimately contribute less to the bottom line than expected.
Supplier delays, discrepancies between ordered and received quantities, and unshipped orders affect availability, sales, and customer commitments. Even when goods are already in transit, you need to know what a revised arrival date means for inventory, fulfillment, and revenue. When buying, logistics, and sales each work from their own overview, the impact often only becomes clear when items are not available on time.
A dashboard only becomes useful when it answers the questions that arise in day-to-day operations. In fashion, this usually involves a combination of collection and sales management and control over purchasing, inventory, and delivery.
An ERP system contains much of the data needed for analysis: items, customers, suppliers, sales orders, purchase orders, inventory, invoices, and general ledger transactions. To use this data for decision-making, it must be meaningfully connected with information from stores, webshops, EDI, logistics, and other operational systems.
An item consists of more than an item number. It belongs to a brand, collection, season, category, color, and size. Sales orders may include pre-orders, re-orders, or outlet orders. It also matters whether sales take place through wholesale, stores, or e-commerce. Within wholesale, you also need to be able to analyze by customer group, customer, country, and sales representative, for example. Inventory may be freely available, reserved, in transit, or allocated to a specific customer or sales channel. Only when these structures are aligned can you reliably drill down from an overall view to the underlying customer, order, item variant, inventory position, or invoice line.
Questions about actual profitability, inventory requirements, and future sales sometimes require additional data. This may include sell-out data from wholesale customers via EDI, point-of-sale data, webshop behavior, reasons for returns, targets, forecasts, transportation information, staff hours, or costs from finance.
Brands, collections, seasons, product groups, categories, styles, colors, and sizes. By consistently defining this hierarchy, performance can be tracked from the collection and brand level down to an individual size-color combination. Material data and product images can also be linked to the same product structure.
For wholesale, the customer structure may consist of customer groups, individual customers, countries, price groups, and sales representatives. We also distinguish between sales channels such as wholesale, stores, e-commerce, marketplaces, and outlet. By defining customers and channels as separate dimensions, order intake, revenue, margin, and sell-through can be compared at the appropriate level.
Pre-orders, re-orders, outlet orders, open sales orders, shipments, invoices, credit notes, and returns. This makes it possible to track the entire order flow, including gross and net quantities, discounts, reasons for returns, outstanding deliveries, and differences between order intake and realized sales.
Purchase orders, received and outstanding quantities, suppliers, delivery dates, and discrepancies. Cost can consist of the purchase price and additional surcharges, such as transportation and warehousing. By comparing purchasing, receipts, expected arrival dates, and cost, you can see where delays and cost increases occur and which items or sales orders are affected as a result.
Current inventory, available inventory, reserved inventory, inventory by location and inventory with no recent movement. Combined with open sales orders, expected receipts, forecasts and sell-through, this shows where shortages may arise, where inventory can be reallocated and which items may need to be marked down.
Point-of-sale transactions, online store orders, targets, budgets and forecasts. By connecting consumer sales with the original pre-orders, current wholesale order intake and inventory, you can assess how actual demand is developing compared with the original expectations. This also provides a better basis for re-orders, inventory allocation and seasonal planning.
When product information, sales, purchasing, inventory, returns and finance are aligned, they provide a single foundation for commercial, operational and financial decision-making.
Track revenue, units, sell-through, margin, discounts and returns by brand, collection, season, category, item, color and size. Compare pre-orders with consumer sales to identify sooner which items are performing well. This information supports decisions on re-orders, inventory allocation, discounts and outlet sales.
Combine available inventory, reservations, open sales orders, expected receipts and sales by channel. This reveals where shortages may arise, where inventory can be reallocated and which items have remained stagnant for too long. It helps improve availability without unnecessarily increasing total inventory.
Compare forecasts, pre-orders, order intake, purchase orders, receipts and actual sales by season and item. This allows buying and merchandising teams to see where the original expectations differ from demand and make better-informed decisions about re-orders, additional purchasing, outlet sales or phasing out an item.
Bring together gross and net sales, discounts, returns, commissions and cost of goods sold. Drilling down from the total to the customer, sales channel, item, season or order line reveals where variances from the budget, forecast or previous year arise.
Track open purchase and sales orders, delays, partial receipts, unshipped orders and on-time performance. This shows buying, logistics and sales teams which orders require action and the expected impact on availability, customer commitments and revenue.
Analyze wholesale customers and customer groups by order intake, revenue and margin, while also comparing the performance of wholesale, stores, e-commerce and outlet as sales channels. Bestsellers, slow sellers and available inventory can then inform more targeted assortment choices, re-orders and inventory allocation.
The same data foundation can also be used for management reporting, targets, budgets, forecasts, reconciliation checks and self-service analyses. This allows merchandising, buying, sales, logistics, finance and management to work from the same definitions, without having to combine information from different systems again for every analysis.
We’ll discuss the challenges you currently face, what data is available and where the greatest opportunities lie for better decision-making on collections, inventory, sales, purchasing and margin.
For a Dutch fashion market leader, we developed a broad Data & Analytics environment using Qlik, TimeXtender, Inphinity, and Mail & Deploy. We brought together data from various sources, including multiple ERP systems. This supported not only day-to-day management, but also the transition from one ERP landscape to another.
The environment includes applications for management, merchandising, buying, sales, logistics, inventory management, and finance, with analytics for wholesale, stores, and e-commerce. From management dashboards, users can drill down into the underlying customer groups, customers, suppliers, orders, items, sizes, colors, inventory positions, invoices, and general ledger entries.
Pre-orders, order intake, consumer sales, sell-through, returns, and inventory are analyzed by brand, collection, season, item, color, and size. Merchandising and sales teams can see which items are performing well, where unallocated inventory is available, and which wholesale customers or sales channels offer opportunities for re-orders, inventory allocation, or distribution expansion.
Purchase orders, receipts, delivery delays, outstanding quantities, and unshipped sales orders are tracked together. Buying and logistics teams can investigate discrepancies by supplier, season, item, and order, and see which delays affect inventory availability, customer commitments, and expected revenue.
For more detail on inventory flows, supplier performance, warehouse processes, and delivery reliability, see also Data & Analytics for Supply Chain & Logistics.
With Inphinity, users can enter and adjust budgets, targets, forecasts, and planning data directly from the analytics environment. This input is combined with actual sales, margin, returns, and inventory, enabling management and finance teams to compare current results with budgets and forecasts.
From these dashboards, finance users can analyze further by general ledger account, company, cost center, customer, supplier, and transaction. Mail & Deploy distributes standard reports at regular intervals to the users who need them.
Fashion spans several disciplines at once. Merchandising, buying, sales, operations, finance, and executive management each view the same collections, items, orders, inventory, and margins from a different perspective. We bring this information together and ensure that teams can manage performance using the same definitions.
We start with the questions that need better answers. We then map the processes, definitions, and data sources, and determine which data is needed to connect collections, order intake, purchasing, inventory, sales, returns, and margins.
If the question extends beyond a single application, we can help with strategic consulting, data strategy, AI Readiness, or an independent BI tool selection.
We connect data from ERP systems with sources such as online stores, point-of-sale systems, EDI, warehouse and logistics systems, financial records, and other operational sources. We have extensive experience with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations, Business Central, and Navision.
We also harmonize structures for brands, collections, seasons, items, sizes, colors, customers, and sales channels. Even when multiple ERP systems coexist temporarily or permanently, we can provide a single, coherent reporting layer.
On that foundation, we develop dashboards, analyses, and reports for areas including:
For budgeting, forecasting, and planning, we can add data entry functionality with Inphinity. With Mail & Deploy, standard reports can be distributed periodically and to specific recipients.
Depending on the existing environment, we work with Qlik, Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, TimeXtender, or a combination of these.
If you already have an analytics environment, we build on it where that makes sense. We can add sources, improve models and dashboards, harmonize definitions, or support an ERP or analytics migration. If you have doubts about the current approach, a Second Opinion Data & Analytics can be a good first step.
After delivery, we can support and manage the environment, so that new brands, collections, sales channels, KPIs, and data sources can be added in a controlled way.
We start with the decisions that need to be better informed. These may concern collection performance, assortment, order intake, inventory, purchasing, sales, returns, or margin.
We then determine which definitions, processes, and data sources are needed to answer those questions reliably. This prevents a broad data platform from being built before there is a clear use case.
We have extensive experience with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations, Business Central, and Navision. We can also connect to other ERP systems and combinations of multiple ERP environments.
Data from online stores, point-of-sale systems, EDI, warehouse and logistics systems, financial records, and other operational sources can also be connected. The precise approach depends on the available APIs, databases, exports, and access rights.
Yes. This is relevant, for example, during an ERP migration, after an acquisition, or when different brands, countries, or business units still use different systems.
We harmonize key definitions and dimensions, such as products, collections, seasons, customers, suppliers, and general ledger structures. This allows management and users to continue working from a single reporting layer.
We begin by mapping the product structure. This includes looking at brands, collections, seasons, product groups, styles, products, colors, and sizes.
This allows analysis at the collection and brand level as well as for an individual size-color combination. Differences between product structures across multiple systems can also be harmonized.
Yes. We can analyze B2B orders, in-store sales, online store orders, marketplaces, and other channels together.
We account for differences in order type, time of sale, returns, commissions, discounts, and inventory reservations. This enables fairer comparisons of revenue, margin, sell-through, and availability by channel.
Together, we define which inventory is actually available for sale. We consider current inventory, reservations, open sales orders, inventory in transit, expected receipts, and any holds.
The precise definition may vary by channel, location, and process. We therefore also determine which system is authoritative and when a transaction is included.
Yes. Gross revenue alone does not provide a complete picture of performance. We can include returns, credit notes, discounts, commissions, and cost components.
This allows the contribution by product, collection, season, customer, and sales channel to be assessed more accurately. The specific costs available depend on how they are recorded in ERP, finance, and other source systems.
Yes. We can combine targets, budgets, and forecasts with actual sales, inventory, purchasing, returns, and margin.
For entering and adjusting planning data, you can use Inphinity, for example. The quality of a forecast remains dependent on the available data, selected definitions and assumptions.
We do not start over. We first assess what is already in place: data sources, data models, dashboards, definitions, management and outstanding requirements.
We then determine what can remain, what can be improved and where additional data or applications are needed. This may lead to targeted further development, the addition of new sources, improvements to performance and management, or support with an ERP or analytics migration.
If you first want an independent assessment of whether the current approach, architecture or migration choice makes sense, you can request a Second Opinion Data & Analytics.
We need input from employees who understand the product structure, sales channels, inventory, purchasing, returns and financial processes.
They help establish definitions, verify results and set priorities. A small group of subject-matter owners and decision-makers is usually more effective than a large project team.
Want to know what insights can be gained from your ERP systems, sales channels, inventory and logistics data? Barry and Eric are happy to discuss collection performance, sell-through, inventory, purchasing, margins and planning. Email us, call us or schedule a call right away.
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