The merchandise planning landscape has fundamentally shifted from when buyers relied primarily on intuition while planners focused narrowly on numbers. Today’s most successful retailers blend human expertise with robust analytics.
The New Planning Paradigm
Rather than planning at the SKU level, establishing inventory targets at the classification level provides structure and flexibility. This approach sets boundaries while allowing for in-season adjustments based on customer response.
Retailers can additionally leverage machine learning algorithms to analyze historical sales patterns alongside external factors like weather forecasts, economic indicators, and social media trends to improve forecast accuracy.
This advanced planning helps to save time in place of reviewing every product line by line by line. A robust modern system can quickly flag exceptions where performance deviates significantly from the plan, allowing merchandise planners to focus their attention where it matters most.
Owners can develop unified planning across physical stores, eCommerce, and marketplace channels that ensure inventory optimization across the entire business rather than a siloed approach, often leading to imbalances.
The retailers seeing the most significant success are those who have formalized their use of data within planning processes while leveraging the contextual understanding experienced merchants bring.
