| With the continuous progress of the Information Age, the traditional retail industry is shocked dramatically; it’s far not enough for using the traditional management style to succeed in the face of the high level of informationization. Because of increasingly serious competition, many retailers have to face reduced profits, and some may collapse eventually. The clothing industry has the characteristics of numerous and changeable business requirements, clothing diversity, regional and seasonal differences, short lifecycle, etc. All these reasons make purchase management, inventory control and sales policies become tough tasks in the regular operation of clothing companies. Therefore, it’s essential to make good sales predictions and then make suitable sales decisions, so that a clothing company can progress continuously and stably despite of serious competition in the Information Age.In this thesis, chain retail stores are chosen as research objectives. Intelligent management of purchasing, stock allocation and replenishment of retail stores are adapted so as to support high-level decision making favorably. Based on the research of the historical data for several years of a specific clothes retailer, a data warehouse is established by analyzing the complicated purchasing and replenishing process of this retailer, the planning strategy of OTB (Open to Buy) and the sales prediction technology of the warehouse are combined, and finally, an intelligent replenishment systematic model is established by applying industry-proven replenishment strategies taking into consideration the characteristics of the clothing industry. The introduction of OTB planning strategy makes sales prediction not only involves the quantity of sold merchandise but also the total amount. In this way, a company can seamlessly integrate the financial plan with the merchandise sales plan to offer help in decision making. Additionally, the systematic model can also help retailers favorably predict the supply and demand of the market so as to avoid the latency of supply, allocation and replenishment in the current clothing retail industry, reduce the uncertainties in the operation, avoid the high risk of replenishing a large quantity of products one time, and balance inventory cost to minimize the total cost of the inventory and accelerate fund flow, etc. In addition, actual instances are given to prove that the systematic model is of practical value to the inventory management of clothing retailers. Finally, a fundamental framework suitable for fund flow management to inventory cost control is summarized for clothing chain retailers. |
