Assortment Plan

Assortment planning helps you select and assort products into groups to suit your business requirements. Using assortment plans, you can accomplish the following business goals:

Group the right products and quantities to match market demand.
Offer this assortment plan to maximize sales and profit for a specified period of time.
Meet the financial objectives and seasonality of the merchandise and ensure proper receipt flow.
Associate the plans to clusters to meet your business needs and requirements.
Attach planogram to the assortments.
Operate with speed and efficiency at cluster, account, product, contract, customer, and location levels.
Plan downstream activities such as clustering, business objectives, contract management, and promotion programs.

Create Assortment Plans

To create an assortment plan:

On the springboard, click Assortment Plan Create.

Create assortment plan page appears.
Specify values for the fields such as assortment plan name.
Click Save and Continue to create a Draft assortment plan.
From the Assortment Plan Summary subtab, go to the Assortment Group subtab and click Create to add the required product groups to the assortment plan.

Your assortment plan is now saved.
Go to the assortment line subtab to see associated products for the assortment group.

Optionally, click create to add individual products to an existing assortment line.
Go to the photos subtab to add attachments for the assortment plan.

Note:
Content and Experience cloud support helps you attach the files for downstream tasks.

You can view the attachments from Accounts > Profile > Assortments
Click Save and Close.

Your assortment plan is now saved.

You can now proceed to associate the assortment plan to the clusters.

Associate Assortment Plan with Clusters

You can associate assortment plan to an existing cluster to apply assortment plan to all the accounts in a cluster.

On the springboard, click Assortment Plan.

Click a link to edit an assortment plan.
Click Clusters subtab.
Select a cluster from the Clusters list and click Save.
Cluster is associated with your assortment plan.

You can now publish the assortment plan.

Publish Assortment Plan

Sign in as sales administrator or marketing manager role to publish assortment plan to clusters. When you add an assortment plan to a cluster, all the products in that assortment plan are added to the accounts linked to the cluster.

To add an assortment plan to a cluster:

Go to the Assortment Plan.
On assortment summary page, select Actions > Publish.

Your assortment plan is now published.
Specify Publish > Now to publish the assortment immediately or select Publish > Later to schedule the publishing job.

You can schedule the date for publishing.
On assortment summary page, select Actions > Revise or select Actions > Deactivate.

Your assortment plan is now modified.

You can associate and publish assortment plans to accounts and clusters as:

Exclusive assortment: On publish, assortment plan is mapped to accounts within the clusters.
Shared assortment: On publish, assortment plan is mapped to accounts within and outside the cluster.

When you publish the assortment:

A common or single assortment is created and associated to all accounts which has no assortment; this means sharing an assortment.
If an account has an individual or exclusive assortment, the same assortment is merged or updated with the values from the corresponding assortment plan details.
If a cluster and its associated set of accounts share a common assortment and the same assortment is also shared accounts outside the cluster, a new assortment is created and shared among the given set of accounts within the cluster.
If a set of accounts within the cluster are sharing a common assortment and the same assortment isn't shared by other outside accounts, this shared assortment is updated or merged with assortment plan details and continue to share the same.

Reduce the number of new assortments created for Shared and Exclusive account assortment.. You can manage these operations with assortment creation and assortment association sub jobs.

Performance Improvement: To improve performance, track the last active date of the assortment plan. When you create or revise the assortment lines, the job publishes the changes to all associated accounts or clusters. When you add any new accounts or clusters after the last published date, the job publishes the changes only for those new accounts or clusters.

For example, you associate 10 accounts to a assortment plan. When you publish, the new assortment lines are created for all these 10 accounts. And when you create or revise the plan and then add 2 new accounts, the job publishes changes for the newly created accounts only.

Note:

To do a full publish, delete the last active date from the assortment plan.

Add Planograms

As a marketing manager or sales administrator, you add attachments to the assortment plans for publishing to the assortment. You can use the planograms as attachments for downstream activities without replicating the attachments.

Go to Assortment Plan and edit a draft assortment plan.
On assortment summary page, go to the Photos subtab to upload attachments.

When you add attachments for the first time, provide your Oracle Content and Experience Cloud credentials.

Note:
Ensure that your administrator enabled the cloud setup.
You can select and add or, alternatively drag and drop the attachments.

You have now uploaded the attachments to the assortment plan.

You can use these attachments for downstream planning without the need to re-upload attachments later.

Additional Information

You may find the following additional information useful while working on the assortment plan.

You can use assortment plans as a standalone solution for individual account or in combination with clusters.
Remember, deleting an assortment group deletes all assortment lines from the assortment group.
When you publish an assortment plan to an account, a new assortment is created with assortment lines from assortment plan.
Changing the assortment group can re-calibrate all the assortment lines by updating the assortment line attributes.
When the same product is available in more than one product searches or product groups, the new assortment line record overwrites the old one.