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 Retail view we have formatted the workflow to highlight where to focus and what to input.

Key:

Toolio - Format Key

Steps

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.
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 Act / Plan you can trend your sales based on the history and current trends.
Gross Sales Ticket - % of TTL Act / Plan - is also a way to calibrate your product mix in a tops-down approach.
Enter in Gross Sales AUR, Total Allowances % and Gross Sales AUC to output your Gross Sales Units, Gross Sales Cost IMU 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. You can copy across and then fine tune each month to adjust for any negative Receipt Units that may come up.
Returns - 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.

Table

Input (Metric)	Description	Output (Metric)
`Gross Sales Retail` `Build`	The sales growth expected month to month	`Gross Sales Retail`
`Gross Sales Ticket` `% of TTL Plan`	The product mix contribution at category level.	`Gross Sales Retail`
`Gross Sales AUR`	The Planned Selling Price	`Gross Sales Units`
`Total Allowances %`	The % off of the intended Retail Price at the point of sale.	`Gross Sales Ticket` `Total Allowances $` `Gross Sales AIR` `IMU`
`Gross Sales AUC`	The Weighted Average of Costs of Goods Sold.	`Gross Sales Cost` `Gross Sales Margin` `Gross Sales Margin %`
`Receipts Ticket` `% of TTL Plan`	The category % to purchases.	`Receipts Ticket`
`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 Weighted Average Unit Cost.	`Receipts Cost`
`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.

In-Season Planning Workflow

Pre-Season Planning Workflow

In-Season Planning - Workflow Retail

Wholesale Planning Workflow

Merchandise Plan - Workflow Views