5 Planning Maintenance and Location Clustering

The Planning Maintenance task is used for Location Clustering, Assortment Period Maintenance, Placeholder Maintenance, and Curve Maintenance.

Location Clustering is a business process where the assortment planner classifies the retailer's location base into multiple groups of locations that are similar in performance, space, or other user-defined attributes. Each cluster contains similar locations according to attribute criteria chosen by the assortment planner, allowing for more efficient management of multiple assortments. Clustering allows you to choose a combination of up to three location attributes, although it is not necessary to select all three. The more attributes selected for clustering, the more clusters will be created. You must balance creating targeted assortments with the workload increase associated with managing more items, suppliers, planograms, and other factors associated with larger assortments. Multiple subcategories and categories can be selected at one time for clustering with all of the subcategories receiving the same set of clusters. Multiple channels may be selected at a time, and each channel may have multiple clusters. All locations within a cluster receive an identical assortment.

If the Advanced Clustering module is also implemented, the location clusters created in Advanced Clustering in AI Foundation can be integrated with the Assortment Planning solution and used in the subsequent steps in the process. Refer to the Oracle Retail Assortment Planning Implementation Guide to understand the integration requirements.

Multiple versions of clusters may be created and assigned to different Assortment Groups, also referred to as buying periods or seasons. In this way, clusters can be specific to an assortment as well as be reused. When creating an assortment period, you will choose a cluster version to be used for that season that will impact the assortments planned.