Articles
Beyond Product Planning: Where Are We Going
with Merchandise Planning?
(Part I of Series)
(cont.)
Major Enhancements
The primary enhancements to “Basic
Product Planning” include:
Assortment
Planning - the ability to generate
assortment plans that consider key product
characteristics and attributes (e.g., fabric,
silhouette, model, key item, style, color, size
etc.) as a basis for addressing customer needs
and preferences.
Store
Planning - the ability to generate
store-level or store-cluster-level merchandise
plans to improve merchandise allocation. Store
planning can also provide a basis for developing
store assortments that address micro marketing.
Space
Planning - the ability to consider store
space layout, fixtures and capacity to support
the assortment plan, enhance store planning, and
integrate with the merchandise plan.
Store
Clustering/Store Grouping - the ability to
group stores based on common characteristics to
more effectively generate store plans, consider
assortments, allocate merchandise, and address
store assortment plans.
Forecasting
(Forecast-Based Merchandise Plans) - the
ability to generate initial pre-season
merchandise plans based on various trends,
demographics, store/customer profiles,
econometrics etc. Forecasting also helps to
generate sophisticated in-season plans based on
actual vs. plan results at a detail level (e.g.,
store).
Store
Assortment Planning and Micro marketing -
the ability to combine store planning, store
grouping, assortment planning and data mining
into an effective optimization tool to focus
micro-marketing on many smaller customer
segments.
Integration
of Key Planning Functions - the ability to
combine Merchandise Planning, Store Planning,
Store Clustering, Assortment Planning, Space
Planning and Allocation into a consistent and
organized methodology.
Exception-Based
Analysis and Reporting - the ability to
analyze both plan and actual information to
determine key areas for future review and
action.
In our next several articles we will consider
each of the above planning techniques in more
detail.
This article was first published for
Retek
Inc.
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