Customer Behavior for Furniture on Epicor, built for merchandising
Your category managers are drowning in spreadsheets. Ward picks up furniture customer movement in your Epicor data early, with root cause and a recommended move attached.
The full picture: furniture customer, Epicor data, Merchandising decisions
Furniture Manufacturing & Retail changes the scale of the problem: 10,000+ SKUs, every one of your locations. ERP-locked production data, long lead times, and margin erosion you don't see until quarter-end. Ward connects your internal systems and surfaces what matters.
Your category managers are drowning in spreadsheets. Ward filters to what a VP Merchandising can act on and drops the rest.
Customer Behavior, in one sentence. Ward tracks basket composition shifts, daypart patterns, and customer segment migration.
The mechanism. Ward analyzes transaction-level data to detect shifts in basket composition, shopping frequency, daypart preferences, and segment movement.
The connection itself. Ward connects via Epicor REST API. Compatible with Epicor Prophet 21 and Epicor Eclipse.
Capabilities
- Basket composition trends
- Daypart behavior modeling
- Customer segment migration
- Cross-sell opportunity detection
Chat
Ask anything. Ward routes to the right agent and returns cited answers.
I pulled upholstery cost of goods by BOM line against the last price file. Three quarters of the drop is material and freight, not discounting.
| Signal | Finding |
|---|---|
bom_cost_actuals | Foam and frame stock +9.2% since the March price file, never carried to list |
freight.inbound | Inbound container cost +$412 per unit-equivalent on the Vietnam lane |
channel.mix | Wholesale share up 6pp, and wholesale runs 11pp under DTC margin |
Recommend: reprice the six affected SKUs at the next list cycle, quote the alternate foam vendor, and hold wholesale allocation flat until list catches up.
bom_cost_actuals…
Reporting
Pinned views built from saved data-lake queries. Every number re-derivable from its SQL.
| Model | Horizon | MAPE |
|---|---|---|
holt_winters | 4wk | 4.1% |
arima_sarimax | 13wk | 8.9% |
gbm_demand | 1wk | 2.1% |
bayes_hier | new store | 11.4% |
Sources
Connect external systems to the data lake.
| Name | Type | Last sync |
|---|---|---|
epicor_production_stage_log | import | 2m ago |
epicor_bom_cost_actuals | import | 2m ago |
sap_inventory_snapshot | import | 14m ago |
netsuite_sales_orders | import | 1h ago |
retail_showroom_pos | import | 1h ago |
retail_freight_inbound | import | 1h ago |
retail_dealer_orders | import | 1h ago |
Policies
Browse and manage Cedar access policies for your tenant.
| Policy ID | Effect | Resources |
|---|---|---|
finance-read-default | permit | Model::* |
sourcing-read-bom | permit | Model::"bom_cost_actuals" |
dealer-blocked | forbid | Model::"bom_*" |
plant-read-production | permit | Model::"production_stage_log" |
Why Customer matters for Furniture retail
A furniture purchase is a considered, weeks-long decision that crosses the website, the showroom, and the sales associate. The path rarely shows up in one system, so the research a customer did online before buying on the floor goes uncredited. Ward stitches the journey across channels and surfaces where high-intent shoppers stall, so you can shorten the path from first visit to delivered order.
Why this combination
is its own problem.
A VP Merchandising rarely logs into Epicor. They read what someone else pulled out of it, two days later. Ward removes the two days and the someone else.
- 01 Sales-associate influence is invisible in the data, hiding which associates and behaviors actually move a considered purchase to close.
- 02 A long, multi-visit consideration cycle is scored with single-session conversion metrics that make high-intent shoppers look like bounces.
Benchmarks. Furniture purchase cycles commonly span two to six weeks with three or more touchpoints across channels. Retailers that connect the online-to-showroom path and act on it typically lift close rates on considered categories by high single to low double digits, mostly by removing friction between research and purchase.
What Ward has eyes on.
Ward reads straight from sales orders, inventory, purchase orders from Epicor on a read-only connection. Nothing is written back, and your ERP configuration does not change. Epicor stays the system of record.
Understand the person behind the basket. Ward runs the model continuously rather than on a reporting cycle, which is why a finding lands the morning the pattern starts instead of at the end of the period.
Every one of your locations gets its own baseline. Ward tracks inventory carrying cost, order-to-delivery cycle, gross margin by channel against it and surfaces only the deviations that hold up. The two that show up most in furniture retail are disconnected ERP, warehouse, and POS systems and custom/configurable SKUs that break standard reporting, and both are baseline problems before they are P&L problems.
At the metric level. Ward tracks cross-channel journeys from first web session to delivered order, measures dwell time and repeat visits on considered pieces, identifies the online tools that predict a showroom close, and segments by considered-purchase category. The long decision cycle means the highest-value signal is intent over weeks, not a single-session conversion.
What the first 90 days
actually look like.
-
01
Week 1: read-only connection
Ward plugs into Epicor with read-only credentials and begins ingesting sales orders and inventory. No config changes on your side. First insight cards arrive within 48 hours.
-
02
Weeks 2 to 3: baselines
Ward needs roughly two weeks of history per store to separate a real deviation from normal variance. During this window the daily cards are directionally right and the thresholds are still moving.
-
03
Weeks 4 to 12: steady state
Ward hands you insight cards daily, each with the cause and a recommended action. Volume settles at a level a single person can read over coffee. The measure of success is not how many insight cards arrive, it is how many get acted on.
How Ward connects to Epicor
Ward integrates with Epicor for home improvement, furniture, and building supply retailers. Inventory, purchasing, production, and sales data power insight cards.
Setup: Ward connects via Epicor REST API. Compatible with Epicor Prophet 21 and Epicor Eclipse.
Data Ward reads from Epicor
Impact metrics with Epicor
Data lake enrichment
Ward enriches Epicor data with: Sales orders, Weather & events, Contractor/Pro data, Competitor pricing, Vendor scorecards
Your category managers are drowning in spreadsheets.
- ×Promo planning still runs off last year's playbook
- ×Assortment reviews happen quarterly when they should happen daily
- ×Price changes chase the market a week behind it
- ×No visibility into true cannibalization across categories
- ×Vendor negotiations lack real-time sell-through evidence
- ✓Insight cards flag promo cannibalization the day it happens
- ✓Assortment gaps and whitespace opportunities surface automatically
- ✓Price elasticity shifts detected before margin erosion compounds
- ✓Category-level performance cards replace manual spreadsheet reviews
- ✓Vendor scorecards generated from actual fill rate and quality data
Retailers lose an estimated $300B+ annually to suboptimal assortment and promotional decisions. Source: McKinsey & Company
Furniture KPI impact
Frequently asked questions
Ward tracks basket composition shifts, daypart patterns, and customer segment migration. For Furniture retail specifically, Ward monitors 10,000+ SKUs across your locations and delivers automated insight cards with root cause analysis and recommended actions.
Ward tracks Inventory carrying cost, Order-to-delivery cycle, Gross margin by channel, Raw material cost variance, Custom order cycle time at the store-category level. Ward analyzes transaction-level data to detect shifts in basket composition, shopping frequency, daypart preferences, and segment movement.
Ward connects via Epicor REST API. Compatible with Epicor Prophet 21 and Epicor Eclipse. Data points include: Sales orders, Inventory, Purchase orders, Customer accounts, Pricing tiers, Vendor performance.
Yes. Ward reads Epicor data and combines it with contextual signals (weather, events, demographics) to generate Furniture-specific insight cards. No custom development required.
Your category managers are drowning in spreadsheets. Ward solves this with automated insight cards: Insight cards flag promo cannibalization the day it happens. Assortment gaps and whitespace opportunities surface automatically. Price elasticity shifts detected before margin erosion compounds.
Ward delivers daily insight cards covering Inventory carrying cost, Order-to-delivery cycle, Gross margin by channel, tailored for Merchandising decision-making. Each card includes what changed, why it matters, and what to do next.
Ward tracks cross-channel journeys from first web session to delivered order, measures dwell time and repeat visits on considered pieces, identifies the online tools that predict a showroom close, and segments by considered-purchase category. The long decision cycle means the highest-value signal is intent over weeks, not a single-session conversion.
Ward links web sessions, showroom visits, and closed orders and finds that a large share of showroom buyers of a bedroom collection researched it online for two to three weeks first, often building a room in the online planner. Web analytics had been crediting those sales to the store as if the site played no part. Ward shows the online planner is the single strongest predictor of a showroom close, and recommends promoting it earlier and training associates to pull up a customer's saved room on arrival.
First insight cards arrive within 48 hours of data connection. Ward needs approximately 2 weeks to establish stable baselines for your specific operation.
No. Ward sits on top of your existing stack. It is the proactive intelligence layer that watches your data continuously and delivers insight cards, so your team acts on findings instead of hunting for them.
Related solutions
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Root causes, not just alerts. See it on your data.
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