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Using Placeholders in Assortment Plan
Using Placeholders in Assortment Plan

This article will talk through adding placeholders in Assortment Plan

Updated over a week ago

Overview

Placeholders in assortment plan can be used when you would like to push an item from the assortment planning module to the item planning module but do not yet know the specifications of the item.

What is a Placeholder?

Many times, we see that the specifications such as the style number of an item, are determined long after the planning must occur. In this case, you can start your planning workflow by using a placeholder.

Example:

I know I must purchase 3 new SKUs of my best-selling women's sweatshirts for next season and need to plan for the volume of this item, but I don't yet have specifications of what will be available to purchase for this style from my vendor. Instead of waiting for this information to generate a SKU, which can happen long after the plans are due, I can instead use a placeholder.

Workflow

When creating a new line in Assortment Plan you will see that a style number is automatically generated for the New Line. If you have the style number you can easily override the placeholder by entering the style number.

If you would like to continue planning the style as a placeholder you can continue to plan your remaining attributes such as title, color, and size as well as your unit plan, sell-through, retail, etc. To generate a SKU and push to IP, you must first select your size spread and channel by managing spreads. See more on this workflow here.

Once your plans are complete, you can push the placeholder to Item Plan as shown below.

Updating a Placeholder After Pushing From AP <> IP

Now say you have pushed your placeholder from AP to IP but have now been given the style number for the item you pushed. The workflow for updating this item starts with updating the style number and given attributes in AP, Re-Creating SKU's, and once again pushing to IP by selecting attributes only. You can see more on this workflow here. Once completed, you will see that your style has been updated to reflect the changes made in AP.

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