Introduction
Mothercare is recognised as the world's leading specialist retailer of clothing and equipment for babies and young children with over 340 stores in the UK and an additional 174 worldwide. As with any retailer space optimisation is key, but particularly for an organisation like Mothercare who has a diverse store format range from 900 sq. ft up to 30,000 sq. ft.
Within the Mothercare Space Planning Department a solution was required that would take data from an existing macro space planning tool and apply the results to their store drawings to optimise individual department performance across the different store types.
Mothercare was introduced to Visual Technology and recognised the skill set that Visual Technology had with regard to macro store planning solutions linked to a customer's existing CAD drawings via an ODBC compliant database engine.
Key Features
- Communication of the strategic space layout to the business
- Creation of a single database, holding plan and equipment inventory of each individual store to enable store groups to implement the new layouts
- Generation of equipment and facings information, by department to feed into Buying &
Merchandising to assist in the range building process
- Clear layout guidelines for communication to the Visual Communications team
- Indication of sales-floor stock value by department
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Retail FOCUS CAD, an application for delivering accurate and comprehensive store space plans, complete with schedules of shop equipment and the ability to dynamically link to merchandise plans and sales information.
With the implementation of Retail FOCUS CAD the solution is used as part of a drill down process, to translate the top line strategic numbers into accurate store layouts.
Based on a number of store models, layouts that deliver the optimum space strategy are created. These are then used for a number of different purposes within Mothercare.
The plans that are generated are based on specific store environments created by Mothercare's Construction and Design Team. AutoCAD plans are imported directly into Retail FOCUS and then populated with "intelligent" objects to allow for a suite of reports to be generated.
The solution is not a simple CAD library of drawings. It is an object-oriented database application which generates intelligent objects that know what they are and where they are within the store model. The Space Planner can take the architectural plan of the individual stores and easily generate the computer layouts of equipment and merchandise. This delivers large gains in productivity by comparison to conventional systems. The opportunity to run multiple "what if" scenario plans for each store expedites the planning cycle
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