Merchandise Planning

Itim’s Merchandise Planning application is based on the award winning Buyers Tool Box application from the US, which has been integrated into The Retail Suite. It is the best-selling, scalable and easy Merchandise, Assortment and OTB Planning Software, at the best price.

Merchandise planning is a process that allows retailers to plan forward for a season or year; sales, stock and margin can be mapped week by week, associated with a particular range that the retailer is developing across its store group.

Features

Traditionally, planning is conducted both top-down through the merchandise hierarchy, or from lower levels through a roll up of individual department level plans.

The Merchandise Planning process is a reconciliation of top down and bottom up planning, allowing the planner to vary or adjust forecasts, either by period or by ‘Merchandise Group’.

The software allows a planner to freeze segments or periods, or vary them based on ratios or vertical relationships.

Having completed planning at ‘Merchandise Group’ level, it can be filtered down to individual products, and across stores – enabling you to compare historical store performance by category against the planned performance.

It has a very flexible ability to look at data across multiple dimensions and attributes, drilling down and up as appropriate.

The system also allows you to hold multiple levels (or even versions) of the plans, or to hold multiple views of financial plans (revenues and margins) and physical stock intake plans (usually known as WSSI plans).

It can help you set your OTB budgets, and update the plans and budgets with ‘actuals’ as they materialise over the season.

The planning system is known for its performance, and it allows you to hold large volumes of data, particularly historic data.

It is also very flexible, so you can customise your own schemas (attributes) and set up derivations (calculations) associated with attributes. It gives you the power and flexibility of a custom solution, but with user defined formulas and screens.

You can set up simple planning templates, or create very sophisticated planning models. Consequently the system can work for very sophisticated retailers with a large planning department - or can be setup with very simple features for very small retailers.

Benefits

Improved stock availability –The goal of merchandise planning is to ensure that retailers achieve the goal of “the right product, in the right place at the right time”.
Early sight of changing market conditions so that you know things are not going to plan and consequently you can avoid costly mistakes
Planning disciplines promote efficient and reactive process within retailers, our experience is that retailers who do merchandise planning tend to demonstrate better overall long term performance when compared to their peers who do not have the same disciplines
Understanding of how your ranging decisions are helping you realise financial goals
Ensuring that you are operating within bounds of your cash and financial budgets
Avoidance of large and expensive end of season markdowns.