fbpx Before beginning the creation process of open-to-buy, it is important to review your Key Performance Indicators and decide on which KPIs are most important to your business. Many retailers measure their product using Turns, ROI, Gross Profit %, Profit, Net Sales, and others. Once decided, RICS offers many different reports which can be used to review those KPIS and begin measuring the success of your business. To start, we need to set our frame of mind and understand that the overall reason to create an open-to-buy process is to help bring the right product, in the store, at the right time. That’s the overall all goal of having a business, right? If you have the right product, in the store, at the right time, you’ll have a product to sell for every customer that walks in your door. To get the right product, you’ll want to review your data you already have in RICS. It is important to understand how your product has performed historically (Sales Comparison Report), how it trends season to season (Sales By Month Report), understand what product you have at on-hand (Grid Analysis Report), as well as making sure you are selling at the right price point (Sales Analysis Price Point Summary). When running these reports, you’ll want to take a high-level approach and review which top performing classes and suppliers exists inside of your business. Once you’ve identified the top performing classes and suppliers, you’ll want to continue to drill down further into your hierarchy to understand at a SKU level and ultimately a size level which products are your best sellers. Drilling down into the product will help identify your core products in your organization which are the most important products to manage efficiently and effectively. Finally, once you’ve determined what are the core products that exist in your organization, RICS has the ability to help you automate the way you fill in orders by using product models and our Generate Automated Purchase Order Report. By filling in the product model information into RICS’ Generate Automatic Purchase Orders report, it will provide you a suggestion on which products to order based on on-hands and on order quantities. These efficiencies can help you drastically cut down on your ordering time by simply using RICS suggestions as a starting point and then managing the ordering process there after.