Toolio Product Updates: March 8, 2024

Dashboards

Toolio is launching Dashboards! Dashboards are similar to Toolio out-of-box views, they are already configured for you to visualize your Plan’s Performance in a single glance both on Merchandise and Item Plan levels. To view your dashboards, just navigate to Dashboards tab on the main navigation bar.

Performance Dashboard

• Performance Summary: A quick summary of your topline sales and margin compared to plan and LY over time.
• Rolling 13 Weeks: Performance over the last 13 weeks in Sales, GM% and WOS to understand your trajectory.
• Full Price vs Discount: Total Allowance (Markdowns + Discounts) impact on Sales and GM%.  Review the trend lines to understand the patterns.

Product Details

• Best Sellers: Review your best selling products versus last year ranked by Gross Retail $’s.
• Best Sellers to Plan: Review your best selling products against the plans ranked by Gross Sales Units % Var Act vs. Plan descending.

What's next? In Q2 2024, we’ll be enabling user created dashboards where you can create any dashboards for your workflows.

New Location Planning

Opening and closing locations are an important aspect of retail planning and opening new locations can be tricky when it comes to accounting for the expected sales volume increase and ensuring enough inventory is available to allocate to fill the new locations effectively. To assist in this process, Toolio has provided the ability for new locations to be added directly in the front end and the ability to model the new location after a like location.

A new location can be named, note that the external Id must match the location code in the data source system. Users can set a like location and a like location factor. This will copy the sales of the like location, multiplied by the factor, in this case expecting sales to be 20% better than the like location. These Like for like metrics are incorporated into curves, automated clustering and allocations and will soon be available in both Merchandise Planning and Item planning. The open date is the date on which the new location is expected to begin accumulating its own sales and the date on which like location demand will be accumulated.

*Note that comp planning will be introduced in Q2 2024

Return Profiles

As returns are part of every retailers business, planning for them effectively is important, and can help optimize buying and allocation of inventory to maximize sell through. Return rate profiles allow for planning not only the expected rate of sales returns but also the amount of the returned inventory that can be sold again in the future. This provides users the flexibility to apply different profiles to product categories that may have a larger return rate and in some cases product categories that can not be resold after return.

The return rate profile can be set with an expected return rate on sales, the delay between the sales and the returns flowing back, the reuse rate and the delay in preparing the product to be sold to customers again.

The result of application shows the new metric, sales returns at 10% of the gross sales from the week before and the inventory returns at 50% of the returns available to be sold again a week after that.

Return rate profiles are currently available in allocations and the new assortment planning module.

SFTP Exports

Toolio now support exports via SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP)! You can easily configure a new SFTP export destination and configure manual or scheduled exports of your Merchandise Plan or Item Plan data. To get started, simply navigate to Settings > Exporters.

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Be sure to check out our Roadmap for other planned features and updates to Toolio. Is there a feature you think would be a great addition? Let us know here!