Assortment Planning / Range Planning

Most good buyers manage the creative process of product selection through a number of different mediums, and can bring a wide variety of factors into their decision making cycle. Replicating or improving upon this “intuitive/creative” process through a software solution, is the largest challenge for packaged applications, yet the greatest opportunity for creating vast improvements in a Retailers success. Successful Range Planning/Assortment Architecture followed by appropriate Item Planning, balanced within an effective OTB, and in synch with Store Plans provides a fully integrated and successful end to end Merchandise Planning cycle.

Planning Prophet offers a number of capabilities to support the creative product selection business process. Firstly we offer our Product Strategy Sheet that takes a fact based approach to providing the Assortment Architecture, and creates the boundaries within which the individual product selections can be made.

In furthering our innovative approach to Assortment Architecture, we also offer an advanced Decision Tree based product selection guide, that helps the merchant work through the width and depth issues that have to be dealt with as part of creating effective assortments.

With either approach we make heavy use of attributing to enable the merchant to create assortments based on those factors that are important to the customer. Planning Prophets Creative Assortment solutions offer:

• Scenario based assortments, that allow for the on the fly creation of the hierarchies and measures that are relevant to the products being considered.
• Simulation based modeling that allows functionality that along with locking and spreading also provides for store cluster based inclusion/exclusion of specific products.
• Placeholder generation for each required attribute or attribute combination.
• Product selection based on attributes, historical performance, or any other exception based criteria.
• Hot links between Range Planning and Key Item Planning, so that you can evaluate the product candidate performance metrics as part of the decision to “select” a product.