Overview
The Forecasting function in Toolio's Item Planning module streamlines the sales projection process at the item level. Forecasting the sales of a product is not always so cut and dry however. We run into seasonal shifts, inventory gluts, inventory breaks, size scale shifts and every other variable that can happen to buck the trend.
This guide will assist you in choosing the forecasting methods best suited for the situation.
How is your history?
If you are forecasting items that are currently selling but your overall history is not a good indicator, your best bet would be to use Merchandise Plan Seasonality Method. This is where Toolio will use the seasonality you have built in the Merchandise Plan module. You can broaden and narrow the scope by selecting the appropriate attributes in the Seasonality Group section. Here is a video walking through a scenario.
The Item has been selling for over a year.
This is core replenishment for the most part or it could be an item that you continue to buy based on the year over year performance. These items a forecasted frequently to ensure PO's are flowing regularly.
The Item has been selling for over a year, but has had inventory breaks.
This can happen often due to spikes in sales driven by marketing events or a new channel buying into it or can be because supply chain issues. This video will show you how to investigate stock outs in order to use a good like for like seasonality.
History is good at the category level, but the Item doesn't have a full year of history or just started selling.
This is a fairly typical scenario. I have great historical data on my Womens/Clothing/Knits category level, but the styles/colors go through an evolution and are folded in as others are becoming obsolete. This video will take you through how to use the current volume of the item and build a forecast off of a comp style or Like for Like item seasonality.
You have a New Item that you are planning but you built it off comp items from previous seasons.
During the buying and assortment process you will be planning out new colors or items based on previous season performance. In this video we cover the process of taking your plans from Assortment Plan and generating an Item Plan from it.
You have a finalized the forecast of your Key Drivers and want to use that forecast to derive other items.
If you don't use Assortment Plan for your planning or want to start in Item Plan you can use the Like for Like method with the Item Plan seasonality method.
You have to run a Discount on a product.
There are many reasons to run a discount on your items. This video will take you through how you can add discounts and a lift to sales for a select time period.
Conclusion
With all the nuances that can change how you want to forecast, the feature rich forecast function can get you the results you need.
You can also use the decision tree to help guide you to the correct video. Click on the image below and download it. The orange circles are links to the correct video.
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