Chico's FAS adds JDA Software to help improve merchandise planning, demand forecasting, inventory management and customer service levels, as well as help increase sales across its three retail brands that include Chico's, White House | Black Market and Soma Intimates.

Chico's FAS selected multiple platforms from JDA's Merchandising suite to drive more profitable replenishment and optimize the merchandise management process, including JDA Enterprise Planning, JDA Assortment Planning, JDA Allocation, JDA Channel Clustering, JDA Size Scaling, JDA Performance Analysis and JDA Enterprise Knowledge Base.

The retailer also licensed JDA Demand, JDA Collaborate and JDA Enterprise Architecture to enhance its overall supply chain capabilities while helping to drive a lower total cost of ownership, as well as JDA Workforce Management to help improve customer service levels and better manage labor within its stores.

"We needed proven, integrated software solutions based on retail best practices that would help us effectively balance our inventory investments with sales goals and consumer demand, and enable us to leverage every opportunity to drive revenues and increase profits," says Jeff Jones, chief operating officer, Chico's FAS. "With the JDA solutions, we are confident that we now have the right solutions to enhance enterprise-wide performance and efficiency, as well as take our business to the next level."

United Supermarkets uses an employee scheduling application from Kronos to enhance customer service and drive store productivity by matching staffing levels to store traffic patterns.

After receiving favorable results using time and attendance from Kronos, United Supermarkets implements the Kronos scheduling application across 50 stores to optimize labor scheduling by accurately forecasting business needs and calculating labor requirements.

United Supermarkets previously used a partially automated process to create employee schedules for a variety of departments. Other departments manually scheduled employees. With the Kronos scheduling solution, United Supermarkets can anticipate the demands that impact its workforce across each store, thus driving store productivity by minimizing over- and under-staffing.

United Supermarkets will use the Kronos application to schedule front-end, bookkeeper, fuel, and food service employees, and plans to eventually use Kronos to schedule all departments.

The forecasting capabilities of the solution will leverage each store's historical trends, traffic patterns, and labor standards to derive accurate sales and labor plans which, when combined with actual labor spend, will enable enterprise visibility and control of store productivity. The scheduling application will also help ensure compliance with labor laws, union rules, and corporate/store policies.

"Our growth and success are the result of our unwavering commitment to service," says Chris St. Clair, chief information officer and vice president, United Supermarkets. Our use of Kronos ties directly to this commitment because excellent customer service begins with a productive and well-managed workforce. After experiencing very favorable results and a fast payback on our time and attendance project, we knew Kronos could successfully help us optimize labor scheduling in our stores."