Overview

Managing your Merchandise Plan and Open to Buy require you to manage different components depending on where you are in the process.

For your In-Season Plans, you will look at recent trends and delivery shifts to determine a more accurate depiction on how the business is performing. This is when you can adjust your category penetrations as well to see how product mix shifts are impacting the overall business. Please refer to this article here for a walk-through on that workflow.

Your Pre-Season Plans are built on your current trend (and financial factors) prior to having any actuals, except for some on order based on lead times. Pre-Season lets you derive a plan for your team to assort to and buy against.

Pre-Season

When planning Pre-Season, you are planning based off of growth rate, product mix, monthly builds, discount rate goals, return rate goal, weeks of supply, sell-thru %, receipt needs and carryover inventory position.

In our Toolio - Pre-Season Planning view we have formatted the workflow to highlight where to focus and what to input.

Key:

Toolio - Format Key

Steps

Start your plan:
1. Seed your Pre-Season Plan - Use your history and any weight factor to get a baseline. (article here). Skip this step if you have already done so.
  OR
2. Use the Forecast function to derive your plan based off of history or another scenario
Flow On Order to Receipts - Run this function to seed your Receipts with any On Order Actuals for the year.
Generate Inventory - Select this function before you start to forecast your sales, inventory goals or receipt flow. This will be to ensure that you can view the impact your changes will have on other metrics.
Using Gross Sales Retail - Build Plan you can adjust your sales based on history, current trends or expectations.
Gross Sales Retail - % of TTL Plan - is also a way to calibrate your product mix in a tops-down approach.
Enter in Gross Sales AIR, Total Allowances % and Gross Sales AUC to output your Gross Sales Units, Gross Sales Cost and Gross Sales Margin.
Weeks of Supply goals (turn) - Starting in Month 1, input the optimal Weeks of Supply in the Gross WOS Units metric. Continue in each month while reviewing the Receipt Units to adjust for any negatives that may come up (make sure that you have your Generate Inventory function on while doing this).
Returns - Returns Rate Retail, Returns Rate Units, Returns AIR and Returns AUC are the inputs as well if you need to plan them.
Once you have completed these steps, review each category to ensure plans are in line with your category growth and turn goals.
Review your Net Sales (bottom line).

Table

Input (Metric)	Description	Output (Metric)
`Gross Sales Retail` `Build`	The sales growth expected month to month	`Gross Sales Retail`
`Gross Sales Retail` `% of TTL Plan`	The product mix contribution at category level.	`Gross Sales Retail`
`Gross Sales AIR`	The intended Retail Price	`Gross Sales Units`
`Total Allowances %`	The % off of the intended Ticket Price at the point of sale.	`Total Allowances $` `Gross Sales AUR`
`Gross Sales AUC`	The Weighted Average of Costs of Goods Sold.	`Gross Sales Cost` `Gross Sales Margin` `Gross Sales Margin %`
`Gross WOS Units`	The duration of time the inventory will last based on your weekly sales.	`Receipts Units`
`Receipts AIR`	The intended Retail Price	`Receipts Ticket`
`Receipts AUC`	The Unit Cost	`Receipts Cost`
`Returns Rate Retail`	The % of Retail $'s returned	`Returns Retail`
`Returns Rate Units`	The % of units returned against Gross Sales Units	`Returns Units`
`Returns AIR`	The original intended Retail Price of the items returned.	`Returns Ticket`
`Returns AUC`	The Unit Cost of the returned units	`Returns Cost`

Video

Here is a quick video on the Pre-Season workflow.

Multi-currency support

Assortment Markdown Planning