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Validating Seasonal Buys with Topline Plans
Validating Seasonal Buys with Topline Plans

Push Assortment Plan Buys to Item Plan to validate all metrics against your Merch Plan

Updated over a week ago

Overview

Throughout the planning/buying process you will need to validate your tops-down plan to your bottoms-up plan and vice-versa. In Assortment Plan we have the ability to validate your receipt plans to your Merchandise Plan by season. In some cases you may need to get a bit more granular and see your new, carryover and core items by month (or week) and compare that to a bigger set of metrics on your Merchandise Plan.

In this article we will walk through how to utilize the Generate Item Plan function in the Assortment Plan module in order to reconcile your sales and receipt metrics for the season you are in to the tops-down plan.

Assortment Plan - Workflow

In your Assortment Plan, select all items that you want to generate an item plan for. Now right-click and you will get a menu. Hover over the Row(s) Selected section and click Generate Item Plan. This function will take your metrics and spread them by week in your Item Plan module. This will be derived from your Launch Date, Planned Weeks and Gross ST Units.

This menu will pop up showing the item count and the time frame you are in. If you enable the checkbox for Only Update Product/Variant Attributes no metric data will push to Item Plan. NOTE: Although the time frame is a season, this function will spread your units for the amount of weeks you chose in your Assortment Plan and will cross over into any future seasons. Once you click Generate in will push the assortment into you Item Plan. However, it will not bring you to your Item Plan. You will need to navigate to that module.

Item Plan - Workflow

In the Item Plan module, you will want to see how your assortment looks by month/week. Customize a view to meet your needs for review. Then you can select the timeframe of the season you pushed in from your Assortment Plan.

You will need to add filters for the the product attributes as well. In order to capture all items in your season time frame, choose filters that line up with the attribute level you plan at in the Merchandise Plan module.

Review your entire assortment including core, carryover from previous seasons and the new items.

Reconcile to Merchandise Plan

In the scenario selector, enable the Reconcile to Merchandise Plan. This will bring in the Merchandise Plan variants for all the exposed metrics in your view.

Now compare your tops-down to your bottoms-up plan to get a complete picture.

Reconcile Conclusion Example

Based on the tops-down plan, our bottoms-up plan looks high based on Gross Sales Ticket, Gross Sales Units and Gross Sales AIR. This suggests that the product mix is invested into higher priced items than the tops-down was planned for. Looking at the Receipt Units, we can see that the overall quantity is not far off but the flow by month is off. Understanding the variances will help pinpoint the areas we need to focus on.

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