Project Description
Defining the assortment planning process best suited to a retailer’s future merchandising organizational structure.
The Client
A $6 billion discount variety store with over 4,000 retail locations in the United States and Canada.
The Challenge
The executive team wanted to improve assortment planning as part of an overall merchandising transformation initiative aimed to aggressively grow the company. To that end, the client sought to better analyze product performance to determine which products to keep/add/drop, finalize master assortment, select key items, define initial buy quantity, project receipt flow over time for short lifecycle products and develop detailed sales, margin and inventory plans for key items.
The Parker Avery Solution
The Parker Avery Group defined the client's future assortment planning process by performing the following activities:
- Conducted deep dive into process, capabilities, views and metrics
- Reviewed relationship between assortment planning and minimum presentation
- Drafted future process flow based client objectives and leading practices
- Documented roles, activities, timing, inputs and outputs of the refined future process
- Assessed current system configuration support of newly defined future process, identifying any required changes and enhancements
- Outlined activities required to enable system to support interim and future processes
- Designed tools to support interim and future processes
- Identified training requirements