Merchandise Financial Planning

The challenge. Merchandise planning means forecasting and optimizing massive, highly dimensional and sparse data, week by week. Plans are set well before the season and refreshed in batches. By the time a plan catches up, local demand has moved on, leaving some stores short and others marking down.

In Vortex. You plan buying, allocation and price together, store by store and SKU by SKU. Stores are grouped into analysis clusters by how their customers buy, and assortments are tuned for each cluster. One action chain loads the cube, runs the allocation and returns the results, so planners re-plan as demand shifts instead of waiting for the next cycle.

Demo specs.

• 1.5M SKUs
• 2,500 stores carrying 35,000 SKUs each, planned by category and cluster
• Baseline and alternative scenarios, compared side by side
• Optimization and goal seeking
• 2 trillion data cells handled