EVANT PLANNING SOLUTIONS WILL SUPPORT A LEADING UK MULTI-CHANNEL RETAILER
Shop Direct and Littlewoods will leverage Evant’s Planning Suite
to manage their home shopping and online businesses
throughout the United Kingdom
San Francisco, CA – March 15, 2005 – Evant, a leading provider of retail planning, replenishment, and enterprise software, today announced that two leading UK retailers Shop Direct and Littlewoods, will implement its Evant Planning product suite to manage their home shopping and online businesses.
With a variety of well known brands such as Kays, Choice, Additions Direct and Marshall Ward, Shop Direct is the UK’s leading home shopping business, with a diverse range of catalogs and web sites. Littlewoods also has its own thriving catalog home shopping business and online presence, with brands such as Littlewoods Even More, LXdirect and Sport-e.com. With a combined workforce of more than 30,000 employees, both companies sell a wide variety of products, including apparel, home furnishings, and electronics.
The robust Evant Planning suite will help these multi-channel retailers to manage their product assortments for each selling channel and brand, track actual demand versus forecasts, implement more effective financial planning systems, and encourage collaboration among hundreds of employees involved in planning activities.
“The scalability of the Evant Planning suite was one of the key considerations for Shop Direct and Littlewoods, because of the sheer size of our businesses,” says Martin Wyke, Chief Information Officer. “When Evant Planning solutions are fully implemented, we will be providing 300 of our employees, across two companies involved in planning and forecasting with the visibility to manage our brands, publications, and product performance in one tool and reconcile across the organization. We expect the benefits of that to be tremendous.”
The Evant Planning suite includes critical functionality that will help to manage the complexity of the Shop Direct and Littlewoods businesses, and optimize a cross-functional planning process. Evant’s is the first software tool built from the ground up to meet the specific demand of the catalogue retailer, including Catalogue Management, a unique capability designed to help catalogue retailers plan and manage the components of Marketing, Merchandising and planning in one place. This unique feature provides the foundation to plan across channels and across the organization.
“We looked at many leading providers of retail planning solutions, and we were impressed by both the power and the capabilities of Evant’s products,” says Martin Wyke, Chief Information Officer. “We believe that Evant, more than any other solutions provider, truly understands the retail catalogue business—and has created solutions that meet the real-world needs of our companies.”
In addition to supporting long-term goals, Evant Planning will help these two businesses manage day-to-day challenges common to nearly every multi-channel retailer—including meeting seasonal demand, minimizing markdowns and protecting margins, and ensuring product availability to improve service levels.
“Shop Direct and Littlewoods are two of the largest and most influential home shopping businesses in the UK, and we are delighted to have them join the expanding list of multi-channel retailers who rely upon Evant,” says Mike Matacunas, Vice President of Product Strategy and Delivery for Evant. “We are especially pleased that, after looking at all of our competitors, Shop Direct and Littlewoods concluded that Evant is the best partner to help support their short- and long-term business goals.”
About Shop Direct Limited
Shop Direct is the single largest home shopping business in the United Kingdom. Shop Direct manages a variety of distinct fashion brands with both catalog and web site presence. Impressive online sales make Shop Direct the largest online fashion retailer in the UK.
About Littlewoods Limited
Littlewoods Limited is a leading UK multi-channel retailer selling branded and own-brand fashion and home and leisure products through catalogs, web sites and high street stores.
About Evant Planning
Evant Planning is the retail industry’s first six-dimensional scalable, end-to-end planning solution designed to support multi-channel operations. Evant Planning can plan and forecast sales and inventory requirements across multiple category levels—store, catalog, and web channels—all the way down to the SKU/location level. Whether planning top-down, bottom-up, middle-out, or a combination of each, Evant Planning accommodates each retailer’s specific merchandising processes.
About Evant, Inc.
Evant is leading the world’s top multi-channel retailers, wholesalers, and distributors into the new technological age by providing merchandising, replenishment, and enterprise platform solutions that free up millions of dollars in working capital and enable greater competitive advantage. Clients such as Staples, O’Reilly Auto Parts, Lillian Vernon, Camping World, and AmerisourceBergen choose Evant for its best-of-breed solutions that are based on the industry’s most advanced science, delivered on the IBM iSeries and J2EE platforms. The company is privately held and is headquartered in San Francisco, with operations in Atlanta and London. For more information, visit www.evant.com.
CONTACT:
Holly Glennon
Director of Marketing
Holly.Glennon@evant.com
tel: 770-222-1507
fax: 770-222-1472
mobile: 404-915-7492
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