Scenario Playing

Using Toolio's Scenario Playing capability, you can plan out multiple scenarios in a single place. See below for more info.

Updated over a week ago

While preparing for the future, it's important to map out multiple scenarios and project the impact of each outcome. Especially today, as the Corona Virus has implications on operational restrictions and consumer behavior that change almost daily, a merchandise planner needs to constantly evaluate different scenarios and adopt new plans on the fly. Given this increased need to maintain planning agility, we're excited to announce Toolio’s new scenario playing feature.

Summary

Toolio's Scenario Playing feature serves two main purposes: planning for multiple scenarios at the same time and snapshotting old plans to access them later. In the Excel-land this is analogous to creating duplicate plan spreadsheets or having multiple plan versions (such as original plan, working plan, last forecast, etc.)

Use Cases

  • A planning team is maintaining two scenarios, a second lock-down scenario and a conservative scenario, which you maintain as the Master Plan.

  • You have committed to an Original Plan at the beginning of the plan year. You want to save it as a reference, and want to see how the Master Plan is comparing to the Original Plan

  • You are re-forecasting on a monthly basis, and want to freeze each month's plan as a snapshot with the month’s name. You are not planning to maintain previous months' plans, but want to keep them available as reference and compare your current plan to a previous month’s plan.

Capabilities

In Toolio, the main plan the team is working on is called the master plan. At any point, you can create different scenarios off of the master plan and give that scenario a name. Your changes within that scenario will not impact the plan you have on master.

Show Other Scenarios

At any point, you can choose to see multiple scenarios at the same time and compare the new scenario to the master plan. Below is how it would work.

In this example, user is on the Master Scenario and has selected to "Show Other Scenario" for "20% Up Scenario", hence is able to see both scenarios simultaneously.

Merge to Scenario

Lastly, if you choose to update the master plan with the scenario you are working on, you can merge the scenario to the master as highlighted below.

In addition, Toolio offers you the ability to lock scenarios. Say for example you want to maintain a Total Year Initial Plan, you can lock this scenario meaning it will become read only and not editable. For more information on locking a scenario please navigate to our Locking and Spreading help article here.

Walkthrough

Please see the video below for how scenario playing works in action.

Managing Number of Scenarios

To keep the amount of data stored in Toolio and maintain top performance, we recommend you to keep the total number of scenarios used in the system at any given point to less than 50.

You can see the total number of your scenarios under Settings > Scenarios . Please see below as an example

Below is a quick example of how you can mark Stale Scenarios for deletion. Toolio will mark these scenarios to be deleted, and will remove them from the system within 2 days.

FAQs

When I merge a scenario with filters on, does it only overwrite the filtered items?

Yes, it will only merge the groups that you have on the filter. You would expect to see what the merge will be limited to after you say merge. Please see below as an example:

Are Scenarios scoped to a single View, or are they shared across Views?

Scenarios are shared between different Views and different modules. So if you have a Planning View and a Finance View, the same scenario will be shared between the two.

How do I delete a scenario?

You can easily delete scenarios by navigating to Settings > Scenarios, selecting the scenarios you want to delete, and finally right click to delete.

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