PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) choices can be a key component in the product development process. Toolio allows you to easily import and utilize PLM Choices directly in our Next Generation Assortment Plan.

Before exploring PLM workflows in Toolio, please first review our guide to Next Generation Assortment Plan here.

In Toolio's Assortment Plan, you can begin rationalizing and planning your assortment with placeholders while simultaneously designing and developing choices in your PLM system.

Once you're ready to import choices/prototypes from the PLM system into Toolio, you can easily bring PLM Choices into the Assortment Plan Style Bank and assign them to your Toolio placeholders. Please find a high level overview of how Toolio workflows intertwine with your PLM and ERP systems:

Before we dive in, here's a quick summary of Toolio terminology in Next Generation Assortment Plan:

Every planned Choice will also have a Progress (Status), depending on its stage of development. If a Choice has a PLM Choice or Actual Choice assigned, the Progress of the Choice will reflect it. Please find Progress summarized below:

Now, let's dive into the workflows - it will give the terminology above much more color.

First, you'll want to start by planning with placeholders in Toolio Assortment Plan. You can read more about the details of placeholder planning here. In order to create a new placeholder, you can simply right click anywhere on the grid and select 'Add new Style'
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Once added, you can plan these placeholder lines as you please. You can assign attribute values, and start rationalizing your high level sales targets.

Once you've imported your PLM Choices into Toolio, you'll be able assign them to existing placeholders directly in Assortment Plan. To do so, simply select 'Style Bank' from the top left hand corner.
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The Style Bank serves to allow you to assign both PLM Choices and Actual Choices to your Assortment Plan. By default, it opens to show your Actual Choices, but allows you to easily toggle between Actual Choices and PLM Choices. For our workflow here, we'll want to select the 'PLM Choices' button, which will reveal all of the PLM Choices you've imported.

Simply drag and drop any PLM Choice from the Style Bank over any existing Choice in your assortment. You'll be asked to confirm the assignment:
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Once you hit accept, the following will occur:

If you're happy with the changes, you can click 'Save' in the top right hand corner. Otherwise you can cancel to revert the changes and the PLM Choice assignment.

In our example, you can see how the Style No, Title, and Color of the Choice plan line have all updated to reflect the attributes from the PLM Choice which was assigned.

Once a PLM Choice is assigned to a Choice, it will automatically update attributes so that the latest attributes from the PLM are reflected on the Choice. You can reimport any updated PLM Choices into Toolio, as long as the PLM ExternalId matches an existing PLM Choice, Toolio will automatically update any assigned Choices to take on the updated attributes.

Once your Actual Choices are created in your ERP, you can import them into Toolio. It doesn't matter where Actual Choice creation originates from - Toolio, PLM system, or ERP directly - Toolio relies on your incoming Product feed to import finalized Choices at the SKU level.

Just like with the PLM Choice assignment, open the Style Bank to display your Actual Choices. Then, simply drag and drop an Actual Choice on a Choice in your assortment to assign it.

Once you click accept, you'll find that:

In our example, you can see how the Style No, Title, and Color of the Choice plan line have all updated to reflect the attributes from the Actual Choice which was assigned.

Once an Actual Choice is assigned to a Choice, it will automatically update attributes so that the latest attributes from the your product/variant data are reflected on the associated Choice.

To import PLM Choices, simply navigate to your Settings > Imports page and hit 'New Import' on the top right hand corner. From there, select 'PLM Choice' from the dropdown. You can create an importer, define mappings, and import the data from there.
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Once imported, the PLM Choices will populate into your PLM Style Bank and be available for use in the above workflow.

Please see here for PLM Choice import requirements, as well as a sample import file here.