Product selection and availability have a high impact on retail sales. Raymark's Assortment Planning™ is designed to help retailers specify an assortment that maximizes sales or gross margin. Developed to bridge the gap between financial planning and order processing in the Xpert-Series™ suite of applications, the Raymark Assortment Planning™ solution allows merchandise from the merchandise financial plan in Raymark's Planning module to be selected for assortment before purchase orders are created and approved in the Global Ordering Purchasing module.

Raymark's Assortment Planning™ provides business users with the ability to create, analyze and approve assortment plans and send them to the next stage of the order process.

No two stores are the same

The solution is designed to help retailers define store-level assortments to match local demand by:

• Assortment breadth (number of styles)
• Assortment depth (purchase quantity) for each store grouping

Raymark's Assortment Planning™ is part of its Assortment Framework Architecture, which uses predictive technology to provide sales forecasts at various points in the planning process and at various levels of the hierarchy.

Raymark's Assortment Framework Architecture is used to determine which store groupings will be assigned to a defined cluster. As a result, each store will be assigned to a grouping of stores depending on the context characteristics.

The Assortment Framework Architecture is used to define the following concepts:

• Context characteristics
• Grouping characteristics
• Base Characteristics

The Concept

These concepts are an integral part of Cluster Management, whose goal is to cluster stores into groups using POS historical data to identify stores showing similar patterns. Store clustering is a necessary component of assortment planning.

• Optimize inventory investment
• Accelerate sales
• Minimize inter-store transfers
• Reduce markdowns