4 Ways to Make Retail Planning More Flexible
No matter what kind of retail store you manage, flexible planning is essential to profitability, better customer service, and effective retail operations management. Here are four distinct ways to make your retail open-to-buy planning more flexible.
- Segment your Data – A good open-to-buy planning solution will allow you to segment your data views. Different decision makers at different levels of your organization, and in different departments, will be interested in different sets of data. Make it easy for every member of your planning team to see the information they need to see in order to weigh in on buying decisions.
- Lock and unlock your data cells – Every data cell has valuable information, but you don’t need to see every cell for every query. A decision is only as good as the information on which it is based. Make the bet buying decisions for your retail operation by locking and unlocking data cells based on the importance they have to your query.
- Plan across multiple seasons – Effective buying centers around the season. You’ll sell certain types of product more in the winter and others more in the summer. Plan your merchandising around each season so that you can order the right amount and the right type of products you need for each season.
- Make use of historical analysis tools – You can judge future sales on past buying and customer behavior signals. Make use of historical data to compare products, customers, and other data sets so that you can make more effective buying decisions based on historical data.
Retail operations are changing. You may need to tweak your buying habits and processes to be more competitive. Your competition is no longer the retailer across the street, but the e-tailer on the other side of the planet. Make better buying decisions by being more flexible.
