The Growing Complexity
Retailers are juggling more challenges than ever—shifting consumer demands, expanding sales channels, and financial unpredictability. Sticking with manual processes isn’t just old-fashioned; it’s a recipe for falling behind.
The Key Challenge
Here’s the big issue: many retailers struggle to mesh their big-picture financial goals with the nitty-gritty of in-store or item-specific assortment plans. High-level strategies often don’t translate well into actionable plans, making it tough to deliver what’s needed at the store level.
1. The Need for Sophisticated Assortment Planning in a Complex Market
2. Why Retailers Struggle Without Integratred Planning
3. Infographic: From Confusion to Clarity
4. The Cost of Doing Nothing
5. Blog: The Benefits of Improved Merchandise Plan Reconciliation for Retailers
6. Solving the Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Gap
7. Case Study: Hunter Bell’s Journey to Efficient Inventory Management with Toolio
8. Resources: Calculate the Potential ROI from Integrated Assortment Planning
Lack of Visibility:
Financial teams often lack visibility into buying, which makes it difficult to align strategic buying decisions with broader financial goals. Without clear connections between financial targets and assortment plans, retailers risk misalignment in their product investments and profitability goals.
Inefficient Manual Processes:
Relying on outdated tools leads to mistakes and sluggish decision-making. By the time all the data is pulled together, the moment to act has likely passed.
Inability to Adjust to Market Changes:
When external factors such as consumer trends or supply chain changes, it becomes difficult to adjust your assortment strategy quickly with manual documents and processes.
Siloed Communication Across Teams:
When finance, merchandising, and operations work in different systems, there’s a communication breakdown. Misaligned objectives, duplicated efforts, and delayed decision-making are common results.
Broad Planning Solutions:
These tools are designed to serve multiple industries and tend to focus on high-level financial or operational management. While they may offer robust budgeting and forecasting features, they lack the granularity required to handle specific issues, such as seasonal trends, size curves, and product-level buying strategies.
Focused Solutions:
Some solutions specialize in areas like demand forecasting or sales analytics, but they don’t provide a comprehensive, end-to-end approach. They often fail to connect high-level strategies—such as financial goals—with detailed product assortment execution, leaving teams juggling multiple tools and processes
Lack of agility and real-time insights:
Many traditional planning tools rely on rigid, static cycles that can’t keep up with rapid shifts in demand or supply disruptions. Teams are forced to rely on lagging metrics that lead to missed sales or overstock. On top of that, limited scenario planning capabilities make it difficult to quickly model what-if scenarios that offer the flexibility and real-time insights needed to adjust strategies on the fly and stay competitive.
Lost Sales Opportunities:
Mismanaged inventory often results from a lack of visibility and foresight into what items sell best. This mismanagement can lead to overstocking unpopular products and understocking high-demand ones, causing not only lost revenue from missed sales but also additional costs due to excessive markdowns to clear unsold stock. Effective integrated assortment planning optimizes inventory to align with consumer demand, reducing the risk of these lost opportunities.
Increased Operational Costs:
Relying on manual methods or outdated systems is inefficient and labor-intensive. Teams must spend considerable time gathering data, analyzing trends, and forecasting needs without the aid of automation. This not only slows down the process but also increases labor costs as more personnel hours are needed to perform tasks that could be automated. An integrated planning system streamlines these processes, significantly reducing the time and labor required for inventory management.
Strategic Misalignment:
Without an integrated system, different departments such as sales, finance, and operations may operate with different data sets or goals, leading to a lack of unified strategy. This causes delays in critical decisions and undermines the effectiveness of promotional activities, ultimately impacting the bottom line. An integrated approach ensures that all parts of the organization are in lock-step, enabling a cohesive strategy that maximizes both efficiency and profitability.
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Real-Time Visibility Between Financial Targets and Execution:
Financial teams often lack visibility into buying, which makes it difficult to align strategic buying decisions with broader financial goals. Without clear connections between financial targets and assortment plans, retailers risk misalignment in their product investments and profitability goals.
Eliminating Inefficient Manual Processes:
Toolio replaces time-consuming manual tasks with automated workflows, ensuring data consistency and reducing the risk of errors. By automating data consolidation and analysis, teams can spend more time on strategic decision-making rather than on administrative tasks.
Adjusting to Market Changes with Agility:
Scenario Planning & What-If Analyses tools allow retailers to quickly model and test multiple assortment strategies, ensuring they are prepared to respond swiftly to external market shifts, such as demand spikes or supply chain disruptions.
Fostering Seamless Communication Across Teams:
Toolio creates a centralized platform where merchandising, finance, and operations teams can work together in real-time. This reduces silos and miscommunication, ensuring that everyone is aligned on goals and execution strategies.
Ensuring Access to Data for Decision Making:
With real-time data integration, decision-makers no longer have to wait for consolidated reports. They can access up-to-date information across all relevant data points, from sales performance to stock levels, in one platform.
Reconciling Top-Down Plans with Store-Level Execution:
Toolio’s system automatically rolls up SKU-level plans into broader financial forecasts, allowing for seamless reconciliation between store-level decisions and high-level targets. Any deviations are flagged in real-time, allowing for immediate corrective action.
Managing Assortments Across Multiple Channels or Regions:
With Toolio’s visual assortment planning tools, retailers can easily manage product assortments across various channels, regions, or stores. This ensures that the right products are allocated to the right locations, optimizing sell-through and reducing markdowns.
TOOLIO CUSTOMERS REPORT
30% MORE TIME
For strategic decision making,
REDUCTION
In Out of Stocks
IMPROVED
Visibility and Collaboration
FASTER
Inventory Turns
AT LEAST A %1
Improvement to Margins
case studıes
About
Hunter Bell
Hunter Bell, a celebrated fashion brand known for its vibrant, feminine designs, transformed its inventory management with Toolio’s integrated solution. Using Toolio’s data-driven insights, the brand boosted inventory efficiency, reduced stockouts and dead stock, and improved overall business performance.
Maggie Barclay
Planning Director at Hunter Bell
"The Toolio forecasting module has allowed our team to have in-depth conversations around inventory that we simply could not have before. The ability to forecast with confidence has been a great help to the organization."
By adopting
Toolio,
Hunter Bell has experienced a significant transformation in its inventory planning and management processes, going from spending 20 hours per week on these tasks to 5-10 hours. The extra time has translated into cost-savings through improved efficiency equal to 1 FTE and has optimized inventory for improved turn and a decrease in aged stock.
Hunter Bell’s Tangible Outcomes:
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