Overview
A common workflow for planning newness is to build your assortment and seasonal buys in Assortment Plan. From there, you will want to push these items into Item Plan in order to spread out by week, as well as tie to your Merchandise Plan. Using the functions in both Assortment Plan and Item Plan, this is a smooth process. For an in-depth workflow on creating your assortment in Assortment plan, please check out this article here.
Workflow
Once you are finished building your new assortment, you will select the items that you want to push into Item Plan. You can do this all at once, or just select ones that you want to focus on.
In this case, I am selecting two choices (style colors) to bring into Item Plan, so that I can submit my full plan for these styles, as they are key drivers. After checking them, I will need to right click to open the menu to generate item plans. Make sure that you have size spreads and channel spreads selected before running Generate Item Plan.
Now navigate to the Item Plan module. This is where we will take care of ensuring that our new choices follow the seasonality of like attributes. In the below image, you can see my new color choices are now in Item Plan for the Spring 2023 season. The sales are flat week to week as the Generate Item Plan will respect the launch date and the weeks you planned for, but it does not attach a seasonality to it. I have other colors in these styles I can derive a seasonality from. Note how there is no history on these new items.
I will now select the first new choice for Product_1_2 (color: Eclipse) to follow the seasonality of an existing color in this style. In order to do so, I will right click to expose the menu and select Forecast.
I will fill in Sales History as my Seasonality Method, Trailing 52 Weeks as Plan Year (because I want to mimic Spring 2022) and 1 Week for my Rolling Average (as I am going to select a like item that has good history). I will then check the Like for Like box. You can learn more about the Like for Like feature here. Now I can pick the filters I need and the exact attributes I want.
In this case I have selected Product_1_2 in Blue as the item I would like to use for a seasonality curve. Now, instead of using the trend of historic sales for the Volume Method, I am going to select Spread Current, so I can use the seasonality of my like for like item for the Spring 2023 timeframe. Now I will click the FORECAST button.
Here is my result. The overall units are the same, but the seasonality is mimicking the Product_1_2 in Blue seasonality. For a quick validation, review the Gross Sales Units Visualization lines.
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