To streamline the retail planning process, you can now push assortment strategies directly into allocation strategies. This ensures your allocation setup reflects your initial strategy and assortment plans—without having to start from scratch.
Seeding Allocation Strategies from Assortment Plan
As long as a choice has an actual choice assigned, you can simply select the choice(s) you'd like to push to Allocations, right click, and hit 'Seed Allocation Strategies'. Please note that you are not able use this feature on Placeholder or PLM choices since an Actual Choice is required for Allocation Strategies.
Impacted Fields:
Through seeding the system will push the following fields from Assortment Plan into Allocations, where you will see them represented in Allocation Strategies:
Launch Date
Phase Out Date
End Date
Demand Type
Sales Curve
Presentation Profile
Launch Curve
Return Profile
Size Curve
Location List (includes all selling locations from automated cluster group and labeled as 'AssortmentLocation')
Excluded Location List (from Assortment Plan)
As long as these fields are defined on your choice or choice offerings in Assortment Plan, they will be pushed to Allocations. After seeding, you can update or change these values freely in Allocations. Changes made to your Allocation Strategies seeded from AP will not impact the AP Choice, and vice versa.
Please note that this is a point in time seeding operation, not an active sync - meaning that after the Allocation Strategy is seeded, fields and parameters can be maintained independently from the Assortment Plan Choice.
Excluded Fields
Additionally, there are specific fields that will not be copied through this process:
Location Curve
Safety Stock
Order Cycle
Location curves are not defined in AP, where the combination of Sales Curve and Automated Cluster Group are utilized instead. Safety Stock and Order Cycle as defined in AP are in respect to PO generation, not allocation. For these three fields, the system will default to Allocation Defaults, which can be overridden by the user.
Overriding Existing Allocation Strategies
In the case that you try to push a choice to Allocation Strategies which already has a strategy defined, the system will prompt you with a warning:
"Allocation Strategies already exist for some of your choices, pushing to allocation will override all existing setup in the allocations, are you sure you want to proceed?"
If you decide to confirm, the system will override all of the aforementioned fields on the Allocation Strategy with the details defined on your choice.
Please read more about configuring Allocation Strategies here.
How Demand Is Calculated for AP-Seeded Allocation Strategies
When you seed an Allocation Strategy from Assortment Plan, Allocation uses the AP Sales Plan as the starting point for calculating demand. Here’s how that works behind the scenes.
1. AP Sales Plan → Cluster-Level Totals
Allocation first reads the cluster-level sales plan per week from Assortment Plan — including any retrended values that AP calculates.
2. Cluster Totals → Store-Level Demand
Once Allocation has the cluster total, it spreads that demand down to each store in the cluster using:
Location Curves
Size Curves
This results in a SKU × Location demand plan that reflects your AP strategy while fitting the store distribution patterns used in Allocation.
3. Store-Level Retrending (if enabled)
If Allocation retrending is turned on, the system then retrends at the SKU × Location level based on actual performance at each store.
How Updates in AP Affect Allocation
Although seeding from AP is a point-in-time action, the Sales Plan itself is always kept fresh:
If the Sales Plan changes in AP (for example, due to new retrending),
The next time you run Allocation, the system automatically reads the latest Sales Plan and recalculates demand using the same process above.
No re-seeding is required unless you want to update other Allocation Strategy parameters (dates, curves, lists, demand type, etc.).