Cover Your Full Merchandise Lifecycle With a Retail Planning Platform

By spanning the full seasonal arc-from the initial strategic budget through to in-season management-our merchandise financial planning tools are designed with flexibility in mind. Pre-season, strategic planning and budgeting tools let your teams view future growth possibilities by brand, channel or location individually, in any combination. Intelligent calculation engines enable you to test assumptions. Attribute-based planning then turns those financial objectives into customer-focused buying directives, determining which products meet the needs of both the financial plan and your assortments.

In-season, the focus shifts to course correction. Multiple plan versions and simulations let you model scenarios as the season unfolds and identify where you're heading so that you can make informed adjustments without rebuilding plans from scratch. Location planning ties it all together by synchronizing store-level budgets with weekly goals and staffing needs, keeping the entire organization working from the same financial game plan.

Seven interconnected tools take teams through every step of the assortment planning cycle. It starts with documenting goals and reviewing past performance, then moves through store clustering, where you group locations by customer attributes, space, climate and other factors. Then comes breadth, depth and range planning, which helps determine the optimal number of choices by channel and cluster while accounting for open-to-buy and capacity.

Item selection, omni-channel distribution planning and size decisions follow in sequence, each building on the decisions made before. The cycle concludes with a virtual "style out"-a visual preview of the completed assortment that ties to the financial plan. That enables your team to confirm that the range both looks right and delivers the expected numbers before committing.

What sets this capability apart is the degree to which the three components are automated and interconnected. Forecasting runs at the SKU and store level, driven by daily sales and inventory patterns, with automated algorithm selection that adjusts as the season progresses. That way, the system is always using the most accurate model for each product and location without planners having to intervene.

When allocation is complete, multi-echelon replenishment kicks off automatically, flowing inventory through the distribution channel from supplier to distribution center to store. Throughout the season, recommendations for what items to keep, drop and consolidate help your team make smart decisions and avoid broken assortments for as long as possible. The user's role becomes reviewing and adjusting parameters rather than rebuilding plans from the ground up.

Beyond product design, the PLM capabilities of Aptean Retail Planning facilitate the full scope of bringing a collection to market-including dynamic line planning, tech pack management, supplier collaboration, quality assurance, costing simulations and responsible sourcing. Designers work directly within their Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop environments, while 3D and augmented reality visualization tools reduce the need for physical samples.

Sustainability is also built in. Set environmental goals at collection kickoff, align to industry-recognized standards and quantify collections with calculated sustainability values. Meanwhile on the sourcing side, supply chain network mapping gives complete visibility into supplier relationships and helps enforce brand values around responsible sourcing.

What’s more, everything connects back into the broader merchandise planning workflow. So collection decisions, costs and product data flow directly into assortment planning and buying without duplication.

Our retail planning platform’s modules can be deployed as standalone solutions-so if your most pressing need is merchandise financial planning or PLM, you can start there without committing to the full platform.

That said, the four capabilities are designed to work together on a common data set, and the benefits compound when they do. When assortment planning draws directly from merchandise planning budgets, allocation runs on top of assortment decisions and PLM feeds product data into buying without re-entry, the whole planning cycle becomes faster and more coherent.

Most retailers find that starting with one or two capabilities and expanding over time is the right approach. And because the platform is modular, adding capabilities is straightforward.