Assortment Planning: Completing the Triple Play

The astute merchandiser seeks to align the organization's assortment strategy with its financial goals. Manhattan Associates' Assortment Planning completes a "triple play" of powerful planning engines for the multi-channel enterprise.

Properly executed, enterprise-level planning and budgeting invariably involves a great deal of top-down and bottom-up collaboration. Along with Manhattan Associates' Financial Planning and Item Planning solutions, Assortment Planning makes the process faster and vastly more effective for planners and analysts.

For starters, this trio of solutions provides structures, views and measures specific to each demand channel's planning process. Then they align plans across channels, integrate key performance indicators with Demand Forecasting and reconcile plans with corporate objectives.

Assortment Planning ensures you achieve the right mix of products for your customer in every channel and category. Together with Store Clustering, Assortment Planning can even differentiate assortments based on customer preferences at clusters of locations with similar characteristics.

The solution enables you to build and manage assortments using unlimited attributes, taking into account space capacity, display criteria, open to buy and customer preferences. Any changes to the assortment are automatically reconciled to attribute mix targets and financial goals.

What's So Difficult About Planning Assortments?

With Assortment Planning from Manhattan Associates, the planning exercise is fast, intuitive and efficient. Without automated planning tools, however, doing the entire job manually would inundate your staff with these tasks:

• Manage the end-to-end process of building, managing and planning assortments for new and existing products (and their variations)
• Keep up with assortment hierarchies, including start and end dates and unlimited assortment information
• Track attribute mix versus target
• Analyse best sellers from previous or similar assortments
• Plan unique assortments to accommodate each location's specific situation
• Plan placeholder and proxy items with like history
• Plan and track items using multiple measures and versions and reconcile back to financial goals
• Plan by average store, cluster or store in your retail channel
• Plan by campaign, book or media drop for your direct channel

Contact Information: To learn more about Manhattan Associates' supply chain solutions, simply complete the information request form, and we will contact you. For telephone inquiries, call +61 2 9454 5400 or e-mail anzinfo@manh.com.au