Page 188 - DMGT553_RETAIL_STORE_MANAGEMENT

Unit 10: Cash Management

Notes
MFI specialises in furniture and fittings for kitchens, bedrooms, home offices, bathrooms
and living/dining rooms. It is the market leader in the UK furniture market, which is
worth £10 bn a year.

MFI has worked with a range of top designers to create the furniture designs required to:
build competitive advantage

create a range of exciting customer focused designs
establish a totally new look for MFI’s furniture stores to make them more attractive
and appealing to the customer.
MFI’s major brands include:

Hygena – the UK’s Number 1 kitchen brand
Schreiber – a premium furniture brand associated with leading craftsmanship.
MFI holds 30 of the new kitchens market and 24 of the bedrooms market.

As well as being the market leader in the UK, MFI also has a strong presence in France
with its leading brand Hygena Cuisines. Howden Joinery is another important part of
MFI. It supplies kitchens to the building trade and is the first choice for small builders and
contractors. Howden Joinery has recognised that its customer (the local builder) has different
requirements to a member of the public buying through its retail store network, i.e. the
stock needs to be there to take away from Howden Joinery depots ‘vs’ delivery to customers’
homes.

Recently MFI has introduced Howden Joinery in the USA on a pilot basis operating in the
same way as the UK i.e. stock to take away.

Source: http://businesscasestudies.co.uk/mfi-furniture-group/generating-cash-for-growth

10.3 Use of Information Technology in Cash Management and Billing

The advent of information technology has made the job of assortment planning easier, given the
exponential and spiralling combination of various SKUs. One of the technologies that have
recently facilitated the same is data mining.

Example: The retailer first does a market basket analysis for the representative customer
of the store.
Then “association rules” as a data mining technique for assortment planning can be undertaken.
The association could be in the form of complementarity, conditional independence and
substitutability. These rules establish the association between consumer behaviour as well as
the assortment available. In this way, the store can achieve greater synchronisation between
display or selling of items and consumer requirements. Information technology tools thus act as
facilitating entities in the efficient planning of assortments. In fact, customisation of the assortment
at the individual customer level is possible, given the tracking of the consumer, over a period of
time. This can actually result in customer delight. A retailer can find out from typical buying
behaviour of a customer his level of experimentation with regard to the inclusion of new
product categories or forms through market basket analysis and thus ensure a proportion of the
same in all future purchases. This could be a suggested assortment to every customer.

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 183