Merchandise management system
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A merchandise management system (MMS) is an automated information system to keep track of the inventory in a warehouse or store. Usually the merchandise can be grouped into product lines. Thus, the MMS shows the exact number of products a business has in stock at any particular time.
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[edit] Evolution of Merchandising:
Merchandising traces its growth to the rise of organized retail in the world. Initially as the retailers operated one or two stores, the function of buying the merchandise, pricing it,etc was much simpler. In many cases the retailer himself did it. However, when retailers started adding stores and categories, the work load on the buyers increased significantly. Often buyers had little information or time and they ended up using approximations based on sales volumes to allocate merchandise between stores. This sometimes resulted in stores exchanging merchandise among themselves! In order to overcome this limitation, the function of a "PLANNER" came into being; the planner job was to act as a link between stores and the buyer. The de-linking of the functions allowed better interaction between the stores. Planners were able to devote more time to collect and study store level data, the buyers on the other hand were able to spend more time with the vendors.
