Rapid insights help Pepkor Speciality stay ahead of trends

Fashions change quickly, and consumers crave trendy clothes and shoes, so South African apparel leader Pepkor Speciality leverages merchandise financial planning (MFP)  in Anaplan to serve its customers. Pepkor Speciality brings together merchandising and procurement teams across seven retail brands in Anaplan to provide instant, detailed MFP reports and dashboards for smart decision-making. Automated merchandise assortment and rapid onboarding of new brands accelerate routine processes and deliver value quickly.
 

Home to Dunns, Shoe City, Refinery, Code, SPCC, Tekkie Town, and Ayana, Pepkor Speciality is a leader in South African retail. A business unit of Pepkor, which is a company with a century-plus history, Pepkor Speciality provides the infrastructure to launch new brands, nurture smaller brands, and position new fashion and footwear retailers.

“The retail sector in South Africa is incredibly competitive,” explains Louis Wolmarans, Planning Systems Manager at Pepkor Speciality. “It’s important that brands stay on trend with their products and have the right stock available at the right time to meet consumer demand, so Anaplan helps our brands with stock management, merchandise planning, and buying. These all require accurate information at your fingertips.”

One platform for all brands

Pepkor Speciality chose Anaplan as an MFP platform for all of its brands. Merchandising teams now collaborate with Anaplan to ensure that stores have the right stock levels at the right time of year to maximize sales and minimize waste. Teams also monitor detailed, real-time order tracking and order management data using Anaplan.

“We have seven unique retail brands at different stages of maturity and performance,” Wolmarans explains. “It’s really important for us to be able to take a global view across different product segments, and we are able to do that with Anaplan.”

Working with Deloitte, Pepkor Speciality created its merchandise planning application using Anaplan. “With Anaplan we can automatically create merchandise assortment reports and populate dashboards,” explains Wolmarans. “It really helps our small team to perform better and make smart purchasing decisions.”

“We’ve leveraged Anaplan’s comprehensive support and training resources to build an Anaplan Center of Excellence,” adds Nicolene Rheeder, Business Analyst at Pepkor Speciality. “The CoE provides assistance and issue resolution in-house — often on the same day — which enhances operational efficiency and builds user trust."

Tailor-made for agility

The company’s view of business performance extends across regions, brands, and segments — including white-label retail, e-commerce, wholesale, and branded retail. “By using Anaplan for strategic planning, pre-season planning, and merchandise financial planning, we’re able to include all processes into one simple system,” Wolmarans says. “That helps us be more competitive.”

Pepkor Speciality is also more agile and ready for growth. “One of our goals in a new MFP platform was the ability, when we acquired a new brand, to immediately onboard them to our processes,” reflects Wolmarans. “With Anaplan, we can get to work with the new brands almost as soon as they become part of Pepkor.”

Wolmarans and the team at Pepkor Speciality have more in store. “Having good information readily available isn’t good enough anymore,” he concludes. “We need to have good information readily available that we can make quick decisions on. I’m really excited about the future with Anaplan because of the opportunities that it presents.”