Driven by the focus on “the last mile” order fulfillment and intensified consumer product demands, capabilities supporting assortment planning and store clustering must optimize what you offer and where your products are to meet your shoppers’ need for instant gratification. This involves:

• Blending the classic art of the assortment with data and advanced analytics
• Expanding and focusing on product and location attributes
• Instilling elements of sustainability and diversity into assortment and product development decisions

With consumer trends changing as quickly as technology, speed to market is critical. Despite this, many brands continue to use a myriad of spreadsheets and aged, disjointed retail legacy systems to manage product development. Forward-thinking retailers should investigate modern product lifecycle management (PLM) systems that can provide capabilities to:

• Enable speed and efficiencies throughout the product development process
• Utilize 3D/virtual capabilities for sampling and testing, adding speed and efficiencies and reducing the need for overseas buying trips
• Tightly integrate product development and assortment planning processes and tools

Taking nothing away from the importance of a strong merchandise financial planning process supported by a modern solution, some of the concepts, functions, and approaches have not changed much in years. Preseason planning and in-season OTB management need to be in a common solution with agreed metrics and consistent process and cadence. Role alignment and management of the plan between buying and planning is key. The most recent focus is ensuring planning supports omnichannel capabilities—meaning the ability to plan sales, inventory, and margin by channel and utilizing analytics to understand and capture demand.

Over the past couple of years, leading allocation and replenishment applications have received tweaks and enhancements. If you implemented a new system in recent years, you are likely ok. However, some caveats include:

• Forecasting systems and approaches have improved dramatically in recent years. Depending on the environment, allocation and replenishment solutions benefit from a modern forecast at the appropriate level of detail. Further, to most optimally manage both processes and address supply chain variability, the forecast needs to be managed regularly (not “set it and forget it”).
• Integration is critical for both, for up-to-date information on inventory, orders, and sales. While clean integration is always a challenge, an advanced layer of integration is needed to account for true demand across multiple transaction and fulfillment channels.
• Some retailers are blurring the lines between allocation and replenishment. Rather than categorizing a product as either allocation (fashion/seasonal) or replenishment (basic), they think more in terms of the product lifecycle. Meaning, a product may move from one to the other over time. Being able to do this in one versus multiple systems can be beneficial.

Analytics should no longer be viewed as behind-the-scenes data science magic, but an enabler for true enterprise intelligence and agility. For any retailer to truly take advantage of advanced analytics solutions that have recently penetrated the retail technology landscape, the business must migrate away from siloed operations. They must understand and embrace new ways of working and collaborating, driven by analytic tools that support and promote transparency and efficiency. Further, the analytics focus must dig deeper into the retail organization to take advantage of insights around demand planning, merchandising, assortment planning, inventory management, supply chain, and more. A focus on leveraging existing data and systems is paramount. Begin by:

• Taking inventory of your current analytic capabilities to determine what you may be able to further leverage and identify gaps
• Understanding and cleansing existing data
• Growing what you do not have (e.g., extended attributes, external data sources)
• Emphasizing business processes that leverage existing and new analytic capabilities to drive collaboration and efficiency

Of course, regardless of your business model, value proposition, or capabilities, the customer must always remain at the forefront of every retailer’s vision and strategy. With today’s consumers more connected, informed, and fickle than ever, forward-thinking focus and resources absolutely must target:

• Delighting the customer with enhanced in-store and omnichannel experiences
• Ensuring available inventory with various order management and fulfillment options
• Augmenting loyalty and promotions