FAQs

To receive a complete custom analysis of your assortment process simply complete the following form, and a daVinci representative will contact you with further information.
Name: Company: Title: Phone: E-mail Address: What type of retailer are you? Apparel - Fashion Apparel - Basic Department Store Consumer Electronics Footwear Grocery Hardgoods Other

I currently plan all my assortments in Excel. How easy is it for me to migrate to your solution?

Research indicates that over 80% of retailers today use Excel for assortment planning, including those who already have a merchandise planning application tool. For this reason, daVinci has an interface specific for Excel users. The baseline daVinci functionality provides Excel users a solution that is, at a minimum, what they have today, only exponentially richer in functionality. A comprehensive planning tool specifically designed for assortment planning, daVinci incorporates all planning elements necessary to support your merchandise strategy.

My organization is just now embarking on customer-centric strategies. We are not yet positioned to take advantage of daVinci's customer-centric aspect of planning assortments. Can we still use daVinci?

Yes. At daVinci, we recognized retailers vary as much in type of business and strategy as they do in their evolution of customer-centricity. The daVinci solution is designed to help each retailer evolve irrespective of where they are in this evolutionary process. Start with what you have today, as data mining and business intelligence become available, daVinci is ready to take that knowledge and help you use it to execute your strategy.

I use a merchandise planning enterprise solution. Will daVinci work with other merchandising applications?

Yes. One of daVinci's fundamental philosophies is its ability to integrate seamlessly with other in-house systems such as financial planning, purchasing, and allocation. At daVinci, we believe the key to successful assortment planning is the ability to plan concurrently with other planning processes such as financial planning. As such, daVinci provides merchants with a best-of-breed assortment planning solution and transparently integrates financial planning tools, such as Arthur, to support you in your concurrent planning processes.

Can daVinci take sales curves, history and forecasts to help get me started?

Of course. daVinci will seed your plans with any relevant history or forecast to ensure you get the best start possible. For new items, daVinci also gives you the ability to map like-style history or forecast curves.

Can daVinci accommodate fixture capacity planning?

Yes. In fact it's all integrated into the assortment planning process. At daVinci, we think fixture presentation can't be an after thought. It must be an integral part of the assortment planning process. This is why we state at the outset that daVinci isn't about the store, it's about the place. It's about the fixture-fill capacity within the store. As such, daVinci provides integrated fixture capacity planning and shipment planning.

Can I get vendor reports from daVinci?

Yes. daVinci has a wide range of management reporting capabilities. Vendor reporting is a standard report from daVinci, as are many other critical performance monitoring reports. In addition, daVinci gives you comprehensive and interactive ad hoc reporting, data consolidation and visibility across the organization, plus exception monitoring and management reporting capabilities.

We don't have a lot of IT support. Is daVinci hard to implement?

No. daVinci's revolutionary tiered application solution gives retailers of any size the flexibility to implement assortment planning at their own pace. daVinci's powerful solutions are grouped into tiers that can be added one layer at a time. Gain immediate ROI and increase planner productivity without the risk and high upfront cost of the enterprise solution. Start small with daVinci's Personal Productivity Tier, and add to it as time and resources allow.

What databases does daVinci support?

The technical architecture of daVinci Assortment is based upon the industry standard J2EE framework. The data layer utilizes any of the major relational databases (Oracle, DB2, mySQL and SQL Server). The business/presentation layers are implemented on the J2EE standard architecture and are compatible with J2EE compliant application servers (WebSphere, WebLogic, Oracle, Borland and Sun).