Opening new locations often forms part of any retailer's growth strategy, planning for new locations and accounting for the extra demand and inventory requirements can be difficult to keep track of. Toolio provides the ability to add and model new locations after existing locations

Below are the steps to configure a new location and starting using it in your plans.

Navigate to Settings > Organization Settings > Locations and click on the add button.

Enter the required information, including all relevant attributes.

Note: The External ID must match the location identifier in your host system of record to ensure seamless integration.

If you’d like to model this new location after an existing one, set the following:

See here to learn about all the different location attributes, and how to set them.

For destination locations, you will have to configure Source Locations. See here for more.

If the store is already open, run a SKU x Location data refresh to associate historical sales data with the newly created location.

This ensures the new location is included in all relevant metrics and reports.

Regenerate Location Curves, Size Curves, Sales Curves, and Automated Clusters to Regenerate your Location Curves, Size Curves, Sales Curves, and Automated Clusters to include the new location.

If your organization updates these on a regular cadence (e.g., weekly), the next scheduled refresh will automatically include the new location.

If you’re using Allocation Strategies, make sure the new location is included in the relevant Location Lists.

After calculation, like for like metrics will be available for the new location, calculated at the factor specified in the new location setup. New location inputs can be adjusted and recalculated as needed.

Like for Like metrics are automatically incorporated into the following functions

Once a new location is created, along with like-for-like store, Toolio will automatically start allocating as long as the new store is added to the Location List assigned to the Allocation Strategies.
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Toolio will start generating forecast for that Location and start Allocating, specifically an initial allocation and replenishment allocations, starting from the Open Date of the store.

If you have store openings / closures within the life time of the product, Toolio automatically takes the increased / decreased sales coming from the store opening in Sales Forecasting.

Below are a few of the nuances of how that works.

If needed, Toolio shows the updated cluster start / end dates within the cluster based on the earliest open date of a store within that cluster.

For example, if the Choice Start Date is W1 2024, but the first store within Cluster A is opening on W5 2024, the Start Date for that cluster will be updated to reflect the open date of the store. See below to demonstrate that:

Toolio forecasts rely on the following calculation to calculate the total sales for a choice.

However, if you have Store Opening / Closings throughout the life of the product, you would need to account for that in the Number of Locations value.
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Accordingly, Toolio has a Weighted Planned Weeks concept. Weighted Planned Weeks is calculated as the number of weeks an average store within a cluster is going to be open for within the life-time of the choice.

Therefore, Toolio updates the Total Sales formula as follows

You can see the calculated value of the Weighted Planned Weeks, under the Offering Set for each Choice.

Now that we have established how Toolio calculates the Total Sales based on Store Openings and Store Closings, next natural question is how the Store Openings and Closings are accounted for on a week by week basis.

Currently Toolio doesn't show the impact of Store Openings and closings on a weekly basis; and that is something we will have on our Q4 2024 / Q1 2025 roadmap. However, the week level granularity on fluctuations due to openings is not needed for most use-cases, since buys are typically placed on a Quarterly or Seasonal basis. Thus, getting the total sales projection accurate (as explained above) is typically sufficient.

At the beginning of the year, we recommend creating all expected new locations in Toolio using placeholder names. Once these are in place, you can also create Automated Cluster Groups that include the placeholder locations.

When the final names and open dates become available from your systems team, simply update the placeholder locations with the correct details. This ensures that your automated clusters stay accurate and ready for planning.

If a new store opening comes up that you didn’t anticipate, you can create that location in Toolio at any time. Please make sure to create the locations and ensure that you put in an Open Date and Like for Like Location. Then just let us know, and we’ll add it into the automated cluster group snapshots that you might already be using.

Absolutely! You can start with a more descriptive name for external id, and you can change it to the final External Id, once it's finalized.

If Store Open dates change, you would want your forecasts to be updated accordingly (and may want to regenerate receipts). To do so, once you update the Open Date for the store, you would want to run "Update Number of Locations" function, for Assortment Planning system to update store open dates, and can re-run forecasts to see the impact.

Please see screenshot below as an example. Once you "Update Number of Locations", you will see the "Weighted Planned Weeks" be updated for the appropriate cluster in a way to show the impact of the shift in the Open Date.