Inventory Management

For operations professionals in the cross-channel retail industry, the risks and rewards of the holiday shopping season are well known. Order peaks can be five times to 15 times higher than the average week. If you get behind processing orders, you may not recover until Christmas is over. For many companies, the entire year's profit results from fourth-quarter sales.

Lowe's is engaging the services of Microsoft to help improve its customer service. The company has agreed to implement Microsoft Office 365 across more than 1,745 stores, 200,000 employees and its corporate offices in the United States, Canada and Mexico. Office 365 will help the home improvement retailer improve customer service by providing collaboration tools to increase communication among its stores and employees. "Office 365 is another tool we're using to help redefine customers’ home improvement experiences," said Paul Ramsay, senior vice president of IT solutions at Lowe's. 

PVH Corp. will open 600 Izod shops inside J.C. Penney department stores in September, Women’s Wear Daily reported. The new in-store-shops will range from 600 sqare feet to 1,000 square feet in size.

Macy’s CEO Terry Lundgren is scheduled to give a deposition in July in a contract dispute with Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc., Bloomberg reported. Macy’s sued to stop Martha Stewart Living from executing a sales agreement with J.C. Penney. Cincinnati-based Macy’s said it has the exclusive right to sell Martha Stewart-branded products in certain categories. J.C. Penney acquired a 17 percent stake in Martha Stewart Living for $38.5 million. Lundgren is scheduled for a half-day of questioning on July 3 in advance of a July 13 hearing.

HanesBrands, the parent of Champion and Hanes, said it plans to narrow the focus of its worldwide imagewear business by restructuring to exit noncore segments and reduce risk. The company announced the sale of its European imagewear division and, in the U.S, the exit from the private-label category and the planned divestiture of its OuterBanks brand. Imagewear, which sells basic apparel to wholesalers in the screen-print market, accounts for 8 percent of the company’s sales before the actions. Hanes expects to incur pretax charges in the second quarter of up to $85 million to $95 million.

Workers at a Cambodian garment factory that makes clothes for Levi's, Gap and other well-known international brands are striking for more pay and better working conditions. More than 5,000 workers from the Singaporean-owned SL Garment Processing (Cambodia) Ltd. failed to reach an agreement with their employers Tuesday to end an 11-day strike. Ath Thon, director of the Coalition of Cambodian Apparel Workers, said workers are demanding an increase in their base pay of $61 a month for 8-hour days, six days a week. He said they want a $5 salary hike and an extra $25 a month for transportation and housing.

Limited Brands, parent company of Victoria's Secret and Bath & Body Works, will pilot cross-channel returns beginning this fall. Customers who buy an item via the retailer's online or catalog channel will receive credit and be able to complete a store transaction in September, with plans for a more complete rollout in spring 2013. "We are focused on really putting the power of our $2 billion internet and catalog business and the store together, actually taking returns in-store," said Victoria's Secret megabrand and intimate apparel CEO Sharen Turney during a recent conference call. 

Looking to kick its retail operations into high gear, hipster clothing chain Brooklyn Industries last fall borrowed from the playbook of higher-flying competitors H&M and Zara, known for what the retail world calls "fast fashion," or ultraquick turnaround of the latest designer styles. As fast fashion continues to win over shoppers, more specialty retailers like Brooklyn Industries, which traditionally freshened merchandise just a few times a season, find they too must speed up their turnaround cycles. That could create new opportunities for their garment-district suppliers and New York-area vendors whose proximity allows for faster production.

Import cargo volume at the nation’s major retail container ports will be flat in May compared with the same month last year, but is expected to see solid year-over-year increases through this summer and the back-to-school season, according to the monthly Global Port Tracker report released yesterday by the National Retail Federation and Hackett Associates.

It seems every retailer I've spoken with recently is scrambling to gain control of their inventory planning, regardless of channel. It's not just the cross-channel marketers fighting it; even pure-play internet retailers are struggling to support their "minichannels" — search engine optimization, search engine marketing, email marketing, Amazon stores and more.