Store planning solutions should be a "stepping stone" in between merchandise financial planning and the Assortment planning business processes. As a "set up step" store planning needs to be done quickly and effectively and provide "merchandise mix guidance" to the merchants. Unfortunately for most organizations Store Planning either takes on a life of it's own, and just adds time, cost and head count to the process or fails to be done at all. Paradoxically the Store Operations group normally performs an essential form of store budgeting involving sales and labor costs. This planning business process is usually completely isolated from the key merchandise sales or merch/store mix plans and more often than not is performed using excel, which of course brings its own set of challenges to the business cycle. Planning Prophet's Store Planning includes all of the capabilities required to allow you to create effective plans that can provide your finance/store operations group with the sales and labor budgets they need and the merchandise group with the mix plans they require to advance to effective assortment plans. Amongst the many capabilities of Planning Prophet Store Planning are:
