How Brooks Bros., Floor & Décor, Lamps Plus use advanced planning

Three retailers in separate verticals are all having success in different enterprise areas with aid from Manhattan Associates technology.

At the recent Manhattan Associates Momentum 2024 conference in San Antonio, Chain Store Age spoke with executives from apparel retailer Brooks Brothers, hard floor covering retailer Floor & Décor, and specialty lighting retailer Lamps Plus about their experiences using Manhattan Associates solutions. 

Following are highlights from each conversation.

Todd Treonze, senior VP & CIO, Brooks Brothers

"We now have a fully functional stack that supports ship-from-store and BOPIS. We started the implementation in 2018, then COVID-19 hit and the business overnight went from being 35% online to 100% online. Brooks Brothers also went through a bankruptcy in spring 2020 and were acquired out of bankruptcy by the SPARC Group in August 2020." 

"Going into the 2020 holiday season, we really needed to have that new legacy management system online. Our legacy order management footprint, from a scale and volume perspective, wasn't going to keep pace with the demands at that point in time because people were still nervous about going to store, so the scalable platform from Manhattan Associates handled the tremendous amount of online demand that we needed."

"Also, at Brooks Brothers we have a higher-touch customer and with clienteling technology we can look at their virtual wardrobe, wish list, and items that they bought before."

Darryl Aldridge, VP of inventory, Floor & Décor

"One thing Floor & Decor is doing better with Manhattan Associates technology is managing item relationships. As we bring in new products if there are similar items, it’s much easier to link them in the past with our previous inventory management system." 

"For example, if an old item is not the same piece of tile as a new one but has the same look, colors and price points, the Manhattan Associates system allows us to much better manage selling through the old before we introduce the new and that's been one of the biggest wins."

"In addition, we can manage our micro-assortment. What we carry in South Florida is different what we carry in the Northeast or the Pacific Northwest. And flooring is a fashion-based business, so we have a lot of new SKU introductions. From the import side, being able to link our schemas that are not a one-to-one replacement and do it at a micro-sovereign level makes meta-information management better and helps us increase efficiency and make returns more productive."

Bill Gratke, chief supply chain officer, Lamps Plus

"Lamps Plus plans to go live with the Manhattan Active Omni unified commerce platform in February 2025. We were the beta site for Active Omni POS back in 2018. We decided that POS was really the front end to the back end and that all the brains are in order management."

"So, we wanted a light POS that would just feed into our main system, which is really how we decided that we wanted technology that would all fit together. We love moving from on prem into the cloud with Active Omni. We also purchased Manhattan Associates demand forecasting, optimization, and replenishment solutions, and anticipate going live in September 2024 with them."