Global Retailer Anticipates Strong Results With New Assortment Planning Solution

The client is a $1.4B international retailer operating direct, retail, and B2B channels with a large product assortment, featuring women’s, men’s, and children’s apparel as well as home accessories. They used a variety of legacy assortment and item planning tools as well as spreadsheets, creating challenges in rolling plans up across all countries and channels. This myriad of disparate tools was preventing the retailer from effectively managing a global assortment. Adding to the planning challenges, the client was going through a multi-year systems transformation, changing core merchandising and purchasing functions and adding significant complexity to key planning integrations.​

With client business and IT partnership, The Parker Avery Group designed new, integrated planning processes and configured an assortment and item planning system to deliver the desired future-state capabilities.​

The project encompassed assortment planning with recommended customer choice counts, retail store clustering, assortment eligibility by retail cluster, item planning, SKU projections, and end-of-lifecycle product management, all integrated with the merchandise financial plan.​

Providing retail planning expertise and using an agile design, build, and test approach, Parker Avery led and participated in the following activities and deliverables to achieve a successful system implementation:​

• Detailed, end-to-end assortment planning and item planning business process design​
• Functional designs for system integrations​
• Functional designs and mockups for reports to be implemented on a new BI tool​
• Solution, integration, and user acceptance testing​
• Change management strategy including impact assessment, communication plan, organizational structure, and merchant training plan​
• Development and delivery of over 120 hours of global end-user training, including merchants and planners​
• Application configuration, implementation, and support​