Automated Assortment Planning Fosters Buyer Productivity

By Erin Harris, Integrated Solutions For Retailers magazine

Assortment planning ensures you achieve the right mix of products for your customer in every channel and category. Without automated planning tools, however, doing the entire job manually would inundate your staff with planning unique assortments to accommodate each location's specific situation. Michael Relich, executive VP, CIO, and strategic planning at Guess, explains that merchants from each of the company's four divisions (Guess, G by Guess, Guess Factory, and Marciano) were calculating assortments on spreadsheets, and the process lacked uniformity among divisions. Because the divisions approached manual assortment planning differently, Relich deemed an automated solution necessary for merchants to create a common assortment plan among divisions.