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:
Steps
Start your plan:
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
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 %
andGross Sales AUC
to output yourGross Sales Units
,Gross Sales Cost
andGross 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 theReceipt Units
to adjust for any negatives that may come up (make sure that you have yourGenerate Inventory
function on while doing this).Returns -
Returns Rate Retail
,Returns Rate Units
,Returns AIR
andReturns 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) |
| The sales growth expected month to month |
|
| The product mix contribution at category level. |
|
| The intended Retail Price |
|
| The % off of the intended Ticket Price at the point of sale. |
|
| The Weighted Average of Costs of Goods Sold. |
|
| The duration of time the inventory will last based on your weekly sales. | |
| The intended Retail Price |
|
| The Unit Cost |
|
| The % of Retail $'s returned |
|
| The % of units returned against Gross Sales Units |
|
| The original intended Retail Price of the items returned. |
|
| The Unit Cost of the returned units |
|
Video
Here is a quick video on the Pre-Season workflow.