CLIENT CONTEXT

Skechers China operates a footwear retail business across directly operated stores, franchise / distributor stores, e-commerce channels and new-retail initiatives. The core challenge was coordinating merchandise decisions, sales targets, inventory positions, open-to-buy (OTB) plans and channel performance across categories, regions and teams.

Operating complexity: thousands of stores across direct, franchise / distributor and e-commerce channels, with around 7,000 SKUs.

Its analytics environment already included SAP finance, WMS, POS, CDP, business / data platform components, existing BI / reporting tools and manual reports. Guandata supported a business-facing BI and analytics layer on top of this environment, rather than replacing existing enterprise or retail systems.

BUSINESS CHALLENGES

As channels, categories and regional teams expanded, the challenge became less about whether data existed, and more about whether teams could read sales, merchandise, inventory, finance and channel performance with consistent logic. Fast-changing retail scenarios made indicators, analysis paths and decision views difficult to standardize.

Planning was especially demanding: teams needed to combine targets, orders, inventory and OTB assumptions, break targets down by channel, category and time horizon, and monitor rolling inventory-level projections. Manual consolidation and repeated desktop, mobile and reporting-view development slowed analysis and limited self-service.

GUANDATA SOLUTION

Guandata organized key indicators and analysis scenarios into reusable BI assets for merchandise analytics, retail operations, channel performance, planning and management dashboards.

Key scenarios covered sell-in / sell-through (SI / ST), retail KPI trends, product-structure and new-product sell-through analysis, sales-and-inventory visibility, store operations, real-time rankings, executive dashboards, and demand-planning views for target breakdown, OTB assumptions and rolling inventory-level projections. The same logic could be reused across desktop, mobile apps and large-screen dashboards for headquarters, regional, e-commerce, merchandise and store-operation teams.

SELECTED ANALYTICS SCENARIOS

BUSINESS IMPACT

With Guandata, Skechers China made sales, merchandise and planning analysis more consistent across desktop, mobile and large-screen dashboard scenarios.

Teams could work from standardized metric definitions, clearer analysis storylines and reusable BI assets instead of rebuilding similar reports for different channels or teams.

In demand planning, monthly planning views could be refreshed around the 6th/7th each month, about 10-15 days earlier than the previous manual consolidation process. The case shows how BI can support footwear retailers in connecting merchandise decisions, sell-in / sell-through performance, inventory planning, store operations and executive visibility across a complex omnichannel environment.

DATA & PROCESS SCOPE

Works across SAP finance, WMS, POS, CDP, BI/reporting tools and manual reports.

Covers direct stores, franchise / distributor stores, e-commerce and new-retail initiatives.

KEY TAKEAWAY

This case shows how a business-facing analytics layer supports footwear merchandise, sales-and-inventory visibility, demand planning, finance and omnichannel retail operations.