Retailer’s New Assortment and Item Planning Solution Improves Visibility

Parker Avery guided this client through their assortment and item planning solution implementation, resulting in business efficiencies and better visibility into the planning processes.

Future-State Capabilities Defined

Solution Testing and Training Delivered

New APIP Solution Training Delivered

Client Challenge

The client is a leading, privately owned brand featuring fly fishing gear, sportswear, innovative pet products, fine gifts, home furnishings, luggage, and travel accessories. Founded as a mail-order business, the client had expanded to retail stores and digital channels. However, they relied on antiquated catalog planning processes, which limited the ability to create effective assortment strategies across all channels. Additionally, there was minimal reconciliation by channels between the merchandise financial plans (MFPs), assortment plans, and item plans. The client also wished to reduce SKU count, but there was limited visibility to the number of items in the assortment.

The retailer had selected a new assortment planning and item planning (APIP) solution and wanted to stay as close to the cloud-based ‘out-of-the-box’ solution as possible.

Parker Avery Solution

Parker Avery led the client business team through the ‘out-of-the-box’ assortment and item planning system to identify business-critical configuration changes to support desired future state capabilities. Further, Parker Avery developed, delivered, and led all testing and training activities and materials.

Major Parker Avery activities contributing to the retailer’s successful system implementation included:

Project leadership including guiding high-level steering committee and detailed core team decisions
Business process design focused on the end-to-end assortment and item planning process
Clarifying and defining responsibilities for omni merchants, channel merchants, and item planners
Application configuration, implementation, and support
Solution, integration, and user acceptance testing
Change management leadership/client partnership
End-user training for merchants and item planners

The Parker Avery team also worked with IT to establish and train batch protocols. The Parker Avery team continued support after the new assortment and item planning solution went live.

Results

The client’s new assortment and item planning solution supports its seamless, end-to-end APIP process that produces pre-season style/color and style/color/size plans which can be updated in-season based on business trends. The client expects the following benefits:

Visibility to merchants’ top-down assortment plans compared to item planners’ bottom-up plans
Reconciliation of assortment and item plans to merchandise financial plans
Reduction in SKU count
Improved timing of transitioning from merchants to item planners and better visibility of changes being made during the planning timeframe

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