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The Foschini Group consists of 13 trading divisions, dealing in lifestyle products that range from fashion, jewellery, accessories, cosmetics, sporting and outdoor apparel and equipment to homewares. The Foschini Group trades in over 1200 stores, making it the foremost specialty retailer in South Africa.
Jam Warehouse has designed, developed and implemented a custom buying management and planning system for the Foschini Group’s Jewellery business in South Africa. The Jewellery Management System (JMS) is .Net and MS SQL based, and is tightly integrated with Oracle based JDA - Portfolio Merchandise Management (PMM) and JDA - Arthur Planning systems. JMS also integrates with the Foschini Group Microsoft Active Directory based infrastructure, as well as a proprietary Image Library System.
JMS provides detailed and integrated Assortment planning, Purchasing planning, Product costing and quoting, and Allocation planning functionality for approximately 300 Jewellery stores. For the Jewellery business JMS is the system that links the sales strategy and range planning processes, with the detailed planning, costing, buying, and distribution processes, as they iterate over a ‘trading season’.
JMS is developed primarily in .Net technologies making extensive use of .Net Remoting to provide the required reliability and performance for Oracle data access. The main JMS data store is a clustered MS SQL implementation, carefully optimised with ‘chunky’ data access. The overall design includes a ‘JMS offline’ option using ‘Oracle Streams’ technology. The user interface is highly configurable making extensive use of user wizards, spreadsheet like controls with stored user views, and includes comprehensive ‘online help’.
The JMS system has been successfully implemented for The Foschini Group including data migration, user and technical training and change management, as part of a full information technology refresh for the Foschini Jewellery business.
The programme design called for a ‘big-bang’ switch on with JMS providing exceptional performance, reliability and maintainability from the outset, especially given the scope of its functionality and the extent of its process, systems, application and data integration.
Jam Warehouse has been retained by Foschini during 2007 to add system enhancements including further merchandise process automation, and the development and implementation of a specialised module for ‘watches’.
JMS has been a key contributor to better buying for the Foschini Jewellery business producing more focussed product ranges and ‘fresher’ merchandise, improved product availability with fewer markdowns, and ultimately significantly increased turnover and profit.
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