Since 1888, the traditional business LLOYD Shoes produces men´s and women's shoes as well as accecoir items like bags, purses, leather clothing, shirts, briefcases and socks. Concerning improved stock and delivery cability, the company trusts in TIA A3 software developed by REMIRA.
Who buys our articles? That’s one of the central questions while checking the structure of the collection.
It is profitable for sales and demand planning to know which articles are running well before a collection or product assortment is released. The premium shoe producer Lloyd located in Sulingen, DE, uses this advantage by working with the outstanding software REMIRA TIA A3.
For about 10 years, the company is confident with TIA A3 and was able to increase its availability to promise from 45 up to 90 %, to decrease warehouse stocks and to strengthen customer relationships.
Ulrich Focke, chief sales forecasting at Lloyd, shows how important software supported sales and demand planning is: “Roughly 5.750 pairs of shoes are produced on a daily basis that’s 1.5 million pairs per year which are exported to 57 countries all over the world. This production is split into two collections. 350 different models are sold per season which means 2000 different options of articles and colors. Sales planning and prediction has to be as exact as possible in order to avoid overproduction or high stock” says Focke.
The requirements to an appropriate software solution had only been practice-orientated. So Lloyd was searching for a controlling device for sales planning which enables an easy and fast number of pairs determination as well as an immediate reaction to market trends. Further competitive advantages that where confirmed by Lloyd are a faster decision making in collection planning, the decrease of manual activities and precise distribution on an article basis. In addition producing processes could be completely adjusted. “We managed to decrease the individual customized production in favor of the warehouse production from 65% down to 15% in the last few years”, says Focke. “With the backup of warehouse production of new models we are now able to deliver a whole assortment, faster reorders of the latest goods generate more profits and the reaction to trends in trading has been improved.” Until the point when TIA A3, a software especially developed for the textile sector, was implemented Lloyd´s planning was run via customer panel and with the help of sales information collected from over 500 sales points. An approximation method that is quite unprecise and can´t really be compared to trend calculations used at the moment. “Today there are four days of extrapolation per season and even the first extrapolation executed two weeks after sales launch has a hit ratio of about 85%.” A big plus for the software aligned at the textiles sector: It supports your planning even for short-dated products.
