Once the company financial, assortment and supply plans (supporting or production needed to generate expected revenue and deciding on the new product mix respectively) are done, they can serve as an input to the Allocation and Replenishment Planning system.
A High-Level view of the REAL process
The REAL software will integrate retail data and warehouse inventory data and combine it with an “allocation template,” historical sales patterns (based on seasonality and other sales curves), space constraints (where data is available) and other adjustable parameters/constraints set by the business. Based on these inputs, the system will utilize a set of sophisticated algorithms to provide a prioritized “recommendation” for which styles to send to specific store locations via an allocation or replenishment process. These allocation and replenishment “recommendations” will then be released to stores by users.
The system will have an ability to group stores into clusters (based on various pre-defined criteria), in order to allow adjustments at various levels in the “NETWORK NODES” (e.g. either at a single store level, or at a higher CLUSTER level.) Stores will be placed by users into clusters, based both on inputs received from the Planning team (e.g. 7th Online Clusters) and a set of similar characteristics computed by the REAL system, based on a set of quantitative attributes (statistics or KPIs) such as sales profiles and/or qualitative attributes such as geography, weather, customers’ purchase behavior, demographics, etc.
The process of assigning the quantity of merchandise to the right store at the right time
Ensures stores are re-stocked with the right quantities at the right time with preference given to frequent reorder products and long lifecycle items