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Scenario for Assortment Plans

These scenarios are examples of workflows performed by marketing administrators and key account managers. Your company may follow a different workflow according to its business requirements.

The marketing administrator at a large apparel and footwear company is responsible for maintaining the personalization attributes (Account Channel and Product Differentiator) that help match the right product to the right account. She is also responsible for making sure that seasons are established, the appropriate price lists are loaded, and the products have correct Effective Start and Effective End dates that dictate when the products will be generally available in the marketplace.

The marketing administrator establishes the selections that key account managers will be able to use when developing assortment plans. This includes setting up and maintaining season periods, delivery periods, and the list of values (LOVs) associated with the delivery flow algorithms.

In some instances, certain accounts sell only selected categories of products. To streamline the assortment planning process, she assigns specific categories to the accounts. This way, the key account manager will not have to filter through categories and products that should not be available to certain accounts' assortment plans.

One of this apparel and footwear company's key account managers manages several accounts in Northern California, including Retailer X. This manager usually creates planning groups for accounts that have multiple retail outlets. However, because there is only one outlet of Retailer X in this region, he chooses not to create a planning group.

The key account manager is determining an appropriate assortment plan for Retailer X for the upcoming season. He starts by reviewing historical sales figures for Retailer X for the prior year period, to help in planning Target and Plan units. Last year Retailer X purchased 9,000 units and $45,000 worth of merchandise.

He then selects the categories and styles of products that he will sell to Retailer X. He selects all categories and styles that are associated to the price list and season, but he could have picked certain categories that are applicable for a particular buyer at Retailer X.

The key account manager determines the type of product flow to apply to this account and season. Sales are slowest in January, because it follows the big Christmas selling season. So he chooses a Back Load delivery flow, with more product shipping in March than in January.

The key account manager has set a sales target of 12,000 units and $60,000 for the upcoming season. He needs to target this volume by the appropriate category, divided equally among Men's Apparel and Women's Apparel categories. He targets both units and amount separately. He targets these separately because of the short product lifecycle in his industry. The styles that sold last year have been discontinued. Since the product offering is different for this season, there is no direct correlation to the price that last year's models sold for. Once he is satisfied with the distribution of total units across his planned categories, he will spread them across the valid periods (Jan-Feb-March), based on a Back Load delivery flow. If he is unhappy with the exact details, he can override each field manually.

Now the key account manager is ready to create the style details for the current assortment plan. He can sit down with the buyer and determine the plan together, but he chooses to prepare a plan before meeting with his buyer, to create a suggestive sales approach. He analyzes each of the available styles, generally based on history or target units, and begins the iterative process of assigning a Plan Unit quantity to each style. This plan can be based on what he thinks the retailer can sell, or what the retailer's open-to-buy budget is, or the key account manager's established sales goals for Retailer X.

The key account manager starts with Men's Apparel, where there are three styles that are segmented for Retailer X: Shirts, Pants, and Shorts. He knows that Shirts, and Pants are each capable of supporting 1,000 units of business for the upcoming season at Retailer X. He enters these units, but leaves the Shorts style blank (zero units). He verifies the dollar amount that this unit plan calculates (based on the appropriate price list).

The key account manager knows that the default delivery flow is not quite right for each style, and can choose to Front Load one style and Back Load the others, and can then view the extended spread over the months of the upcoming season (Jan-Feb-March). Since the marketing administrator has already entered all of the valid availability dates, all of the styles automatically populate in the appropriate months. For instance, if the Pants style is not available in Feb-March, zero units would populate in the Jan field. This way, the key account manager does not have to worry about planning a style in a month that is not permitted by his company.

Since the Shorts style is planned for zero units, he trims it from this assortment plan. Trimming is particularly helpful when there are several styles to choose from in a particular category. If an account is capable of carrying only a few styles of the total offering, trimming streamlines the process.

The key account manager recognizes that the incorrect price is assigned to the apparel styles, and selects another price list and reprices the styles. The marketing administrator has established valid price lists, which prevents key account managers from entering an incorrect price.

After the key account manager has followed each of these steps, he has an assortment plan that he can share with his buyer at Retailer X. Since his company uses Siebel eChannel for Apparel and Footwear, the key account manager can make his assortment plan available to his buyer over the Internet. He sends email to his sales manager to let her know the plan is ready.

The sales manager has received email from all of the members of her team of key account managers, letting her know that their assortment plans for all of the retail outlets of Retailer X are ready for approval. Her company uses this approval process to make sure that corporate directives are met, and that sales targets are tightly managed.

The sales manager reviews each of her team's plans, and then consolidates all of the plans into a single Retailer X master plan for the upcoming Spring season.

She can update new category target information for her team's plans.