Retail Giant Eyes Substantial Growth with New Assortment Planning Processes
Client Challenge
A $6 billion discount variety store with over 4,000 retail locations in the United States and Canada. The executive team wanted to develop internal assortment planning expertise 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 the master assortment
- Select key items
- Define the initial buy quantity
- Project receipt flow over time for short-lifecycle products
- Develop detailed sales, margin, and inventory plans for key items
Parker Avery Solution
Working closely with the client, The Parker Avery Group defined the client's future assortment planning process by performing the following activities:
- Conducted deep dive into current process, capabilities, views, and metrics
- Reviewed the relationship between assortment planning and minimum presentation
- Drafted future process flows based on client objectives and leading practices
- Documented roles, activities, timing, inputs, and outputs of the refined future process
- Assessed current system support of newly defined future process
- Identified required system configuration changes and enhancements
- Outlined activities required to enable the system to support interim and future processes
- Designed tools to support interim and future processes
- Identified training requirements
Results
As a result of the project, the client is engaging in a pilot of the new assortment planning process as part of the larger merchandising organization transformation to drive substantial growth.
The client also engaged The Parker Avery Group to develop merchant training for the larger merchandising transformation initiative.
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