Wholesale Planning Workflow

Out Of Box Views in Merchandise Planning Module to help build workflows and process

Updated over a week ago

Overview

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

For your Wholesale business, you will need to review your sales plan vs the bookings from your accounts. In this case, Gross Sales will be the shipments sent out to the accounts. Depending on lead times or business practices you may or may not purchase your inventory before bookings are complete. However, as a planner/account manager you will want to ensure that you have the bookings and the receipts in order to hit your sales plan.

Wholesale Planning

Deriving a sales plan for your wholesale channel will be based on the goods you ship to them. From there you will be working with the accounts to understand the OTB they have for your product. Sometimes your company's ideal assortment and your accounts' ideal assortment line up and other times not so much. This is when the team needs to review what was bought for the channel vs what the accounts are wanting to buy.

Note: Wholesale planning workflows requires the Bookings Feed integration. Please work with your Customer Success Manager to set this up.

Wholesale - Pre-Season View

Using the Pre-Season view along with our Seed function will help you build a plan for future years. In the screenshot above I outlined the current plan vs the previous year Act/Plan LY with a pink box. This is where I will review if my plan is attainable based

on history. This sales plan will become the bookings needed from the sales team to achieve. Saving off views for each account executive can help guide the process. Once the plans are agreed upon, we can start building the receipts needed to hit the bookings and our turn goals. This will depend on whether the business is a "cut-to-orders", a "pre-market purchase" or a blend of both.

Wholesale - In-Season View

Use this view to review the Sales Plan (in this case Gross Sales Ticket) and compare it to Bookings (Bookings Ticket). The Book to Sales Plan metrics will give a quick insight as to whether or not your Sales Plan is at risk.

Example:

Looking at Aug I see that my Book to Sales Plan % Ticket is -12%. I will check to see if other months are going to make up for the loss. Jul has a higher booking than the plan but not enough to offset and on the total year I am down by 3%.

Next step is to validate the plan number. If I determine the plan is what we have to deliver I can work with my sales team to figure out the bookings shortage and where we can make it up. If the plan was too bullish, I can set my plan at the bookings level and review the downside with the team. I can easily set my Book to Sales Plan % Ticket to 0% so the Gross Sales Ticket and Bookings Ticket are identical. Or I can look at my seasonality builds and adjust the sales that way as well.

Once I am done with my sales and bookings, I can review the Receipts coming in to see if I will have any liability or need to chase into more receipts.

As your accounts grow you may want to include more information into your view like the example below:

Wholesale - Bookings to Go View

Use this view on a weekly basis, to review your bookings vs your actual sales vs your planned sales. In order to get a quick pulse of where you need to focus, we have an out of the box view with some key metrics that will help guide you.

In this view, I can see the Ttl Inv Ticket (BOP + Receipts) to ensure I have the inventory to hit my plan. I can also look at my ATS Ticket and ATS Units (Available to Sell) which shows me how much inventory I have to sell after accounting for my actual bookings.

Example:

I am in the month of June and see that we have only shipped out $1.28M (Gross Sales Ticket Act) of my $1.59M plan (Gross Sales Ticket Plan). I also have bookings (Bookings Ticket) of $1.55M. I can now work with the warehouse and sales team to ensure that we ship the rest of our bookings before month close. As for the deficit in my Book to Sales Plan % Ticket I am not going to put too much pressure to make it up because on the total Qtr we are spot on to plan. If we are seeing a trend where the demand is higher than the original plan, I have over 14K units in ATS that we can reach out to clients about.

Wholesale - Bookings Fill Rate View

Another key performance indicator (KPI) to review is your Bookings Fill Rate. This metric is to compare your actual sales vs what the actual bookings are (orders from the accounts)

Wholesale - Account Review

Reviewing Sales and Margin by account can give insight into where to grow your business and where you might need to change strategies. Since terms are negotiated differently by account and division you want to review this mix and identify future opportunities and risks. Which accounts will bring our margin down? Which accounts are not placing bookings? What the biggest impacts to my margin dilution?

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