Assortment Planning


Every merchant is challenged with how to effectively plan and execute unique account-level assortments that match local consumer demand.  In order to determine the styles, colors, and sizes of merchandise to deliver to each store for each delivery period, merchants must consider the financial and strategic objectives of both their management and their retail accounts, historical performance, current trends, local demographics, and production schedules.  Once plans are finalized, vendors must ensure that they can deliver product on time to fulfill retail orders. Because vendors are often forced to commit to production in advance of receiving orders from retailers, it is critical to gather an accurate and aggregated picture of demand as early in the process as possible.

7thOnline Assortment Planning enables vendors to overcome these challenges with its intelligent visibility platform built specifically for the apparel, footwear, and accessories community.  The solutions begin with top-down/line planning and culminate in bulk order placement, with built-in optimization engines for sizing and assortment breadth and depth.  The real-time production sales reconciliation capabilities provide an instantaneous snapshot of total company demand vs. supply at any time prior to, during and post market appointments.  The collaborative capabilities enable users to share information via the system 24/7, both internally with colleagues and externally with trading partners. With the comprehensive reporting tools, management has complete visibility into all planning activity to ensure that plans are aligned with corporate objectives and to react to opportunities and challenges as they arise.


KEY FEATURES
  • Input or upload financial and unit plans
  • Build and analyze assortments by class, unit, dollar, price point, door and size leveraging industry specific reporting and analytics
  • Automatically generate initial plan based on historical data and defined parameters
  • Auto-populate placeholder assortment plans with product information and images
  • Access up-to-date product data and images (automatically updated in real-time across all plans as information changes)
  • View and compare plans to retailers' financial and unit plans
  • Aggregate planned and booked units across all accounts and channels of distribution to compare against inventory position
    • View real-time available-to-sell by style, size, group and class
  • Apply optimal size scales to each order
  • Full visual capabilities including multiple image views and swatches
  • Generate EDI purchase orders with one-click
  • Access assortment plans and analyses 24/7, from any Internet browser
  • Import and export to and from Excel

CLIENT RESULTS
  • Higher sell-thru/reduced markdowns through better assortments at the door and size level
  • Additional sales opportunities realized due to demand visibility gained earlier in market (up to 25%)
  • Reduced end-of-season excess inventory (up to 50%)
  • Increased order fill rates (up to 15%)
  • Production demand reconciliation 4 - 6 weeks earlier
  • Shorter cycle times by up to 4 weeks
  • Earlier order commitments from retailers by 1 -4 weeks
  • Decreased error rates (50 - 80%)
  • Reduced administrative costs associated with order processing and other clerical activities (30 - 80%)
  • Up to 95% reduction in time spent creating reports
  • Ability to shift from cut-to-forecast to cut-to-order
  • Optimization algorithms solve for maximum profitability seeding unit plans at the store/color/size level