• Evaluate assortment planning capabilities and management software with natural integration and scalability. The extent of this solution should also encompass global access.
• Offer integrated planning for performance marketing and merchandising capabilities, provide customer-centric assortments, drive real-time pricing and promotion modeling and localized recommendations, and provide global support.
• Provide a planning outlook and a short list of viable vendors to aid organizations in discovering the assortment planning software market.

In evaluating the market space for assortment planning software, Info-Tech’s analysts looked at the following vendor attributes:

• Breadth and depth of capabilities
• Vendor footprint (market presence, share of mind, stability, and long-term viability/investments)
• Automation and integration expertise
• Customization potential and ease of use
• Pricing transparency

An assortment planning and management solution aids in creating consumer-centric plans through a comprehensive grouping of planning and execution processes that links merchandise planning with purchasing, allocation, and replenishment through continual validation against strategic goals.

Localization is the primary business factor behind the increasing number of assortment planning management initiatives and technology investments.

Presetting these processes not only saves the enterprise time and labor gathering and understanding large amounts of data; it also speeds up pricing and promotion and exploits the merchandise financial outlook for the enterprise. With greater assortment visibility, the organization can improve its decision-making and reduce localization risk.

Assortment management software can be deployed on-premises or as a SaaS-based model. However, the SaaS-based model is increasingly attractive because it enables organizations to save further time and labor hours by outsourcing support and maintenance.

Source: Statista, 2022.

• Develop integrated merchandise plans down to sub-class/ product-level
• Forecast the weekly plan for sales, stock, and intake to control purchases and flow of product

• Cluster channels, stores and locations based on similar attributes, customer behaviors
• Create merchandise categories based on groups and allocate stock based on pricing and promotions

• Assign products to stores, locations, or channel clusters
• Plan sales for each cluster by product/by week
• Refine Assortments continually throughout the season

• Assign floor space/location to a product category
• Assign shelf space/location to a product/sub-category
• ‘Brokering’ space between categories to optimize store- or cluster-level product mix

• Determine future demand using statistical forecasting tools and allocate and replenish stock
• Align statistical sales forecasts with merchandise plans to develop
  “consensus plan”

• Build a digital media marketing plan and calendar to drive advertising campaigns
• Select and purchase media for campaigns
• Execute mass media marketing campaigns and track them with the right metrics.

• Integrate promotions & advertising
• Implement price controls by setting and maintaining prices across the range
• Execute profitable promotions and maximizing markdown margin

Item planning and target creation

Pre-season and in-season planning with financial indicators that include sales, markdown, receipts, inventory, gross margins, and open-to-buy.

Channel clustering and segmentation

Grouping of channels, stores, and locations into clusters based on similar key attributes for category or customer behaviors.

Range plan and roll-up

Ensure assortments match consumer demand and provide assortments to customer preferences.

Item creation commitments

Create complex item management capabilities, including setup and maintenance of the item descriptions and attributes, weights, and dimensions.

Demand forecasting

Provide planning forecasts for short-, mid-, and long-term assortment models with little human involvement.

Order management and reconciliations

Facilitate the order management process across management suppliers.

Allocation rationalization

Use of sales demands forecast and stockholding to drive allocation and replenishment.

Application automation (AI)

Applications leverage embedded science, AI, and automation to provide an effective assortment strategy to maximize return on investment.

Analytics, reporting, and dashboards

Access to real-time dashboards and data interpretation, which can be exported as reports in a range of formats.

Analyse2

Offers cloud-based SaaS automated solution with robust product features.

Infor

Offers an intelligent supply chain and merchandising enterprise SaaS suite.

First Insight

Offers SaaS assortment solution with predictive analytic models.

Just Enough

Provides globally supported mid to large-market assortment solutions.

Blue Yonder (JDA)

Offers integrated innovative planning and assortment execution enterprise solutions.

Logility

Provides SaaS planning solutions that aid small, medium, and large companies.

O9 Solutions

Delivers cloud-based assortment planning, analytics, and data platforms to enterprises.

Oracle

Large vendor; provides integrated, single view of the enterprise planning and execution.

SAS

Provides integrated planning with advanced business intelligence and analytics.

SAP SE

Large vendor; mature real-time end-to-end (E2E) integrated automated solution.

Symphony

Provides E2E intelligent assortment planning and optimization solutions.

TXT e-solution (Aptos)

E2E integrated assortment suite; Intelligent visual planning in-memory computing.

Vendor Name

Headquarters

Employees

Presence

Analyse2

Espoo, Finland

51 - 200

• Product features – A software-as-a-service solution which automates the right product to suitable locations. Robust product features like sales, pricing, and execution, in addition, show improvement opportunities.
• Analytics and insights management – Established categories which show the potential of the category as well as its sales and development.
• Supports retailer-supplier collaboration to build on shopper needs, targets the right market cluster, and appropriately allocates each category.
• Customer reviews show loyalty – Customers have seen a 3% point increase in gross margin, a 5% increase in sales, a 25% increase in customer loyalty and an 80% reduction in time for assortment planning.

• Limited global presence – Currently has offices in Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Mexico, the U.S., and Brazil.
• Needs to prioritize other sectors – Has a significant presence in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) business and food retail.
• Lack of patents and other standard intellectual property.

Opaque (request quote)

Vendor Name

Headquarters

Employees

Presence

Infor

NY, USA

17,000+

INFOR: NYSE

• Product suite – Infor provides a SaaS suite for commerce, supply chain networking, and merchandising decisions to retailers, wholesalers, and brands.
• Cloud deployment – Infor customers can deploy its solutions on a private cloud, Microsoft Azure, or Amazon Web Services.
• Broad portfolio – As part of the merchandising suite, they also provide solutions for planning, pricing, demand forecasting, and replenishment to retailers and wholesalers.
• Advanced analytics automation in assortment management application processes, including multiple solvers, machine learning, and NLP.

• Future roadmap – Focuses on increasing intelligent process automation, AI, ML demand forecasting engine, and real-time collaborative planning across suppliers, retailers, and channels.
• Largely active in the U.S. market – It is expanding its geographical reach rapidly in EMEA and APAC regions, countries to scale in the tier-1 market where customers are located. .

Opaque (request quote)

Vendor Name

Headquarters

Employees

Presence

First Insight

PA, USA

51 – 100

Private

• Best product performance for new items – First Insight's SaaS assortment solution offers retailers and fashion brands insight into expected product performance and optimal entry price points for new items with no sales history, all within 48-72 hours.
• Predictive analytics models filter and weigh consumer input, ensuring that retailers and brands listen to the right consumers.
• Uses real-time data analytics and customer feedback to optimize product assortments identification and design cost investment decisions.
• Helps drive margin gains for retail brands by showing them which products can fetch a higher price than planned with Margin Mover.

• Offerings are for small and emerging enterprises. Essentially, review customer support and implementation capabilities during the RFP and contractual process to ensure adequate understanding and commitment.
• Need to focus on training and customer support. Even though their big data scalable platform enables thousands of consumers to evaluate hundreds of new products through gamification and crowdsourcing.

Opaque (request quote)

Vendor Name

Headquarters

Employees

Presence

Just Enough

Irvine, CA, USA

101 – 250

Private

• Guided localization –Just Enough’s assortment planning solution guides you through the process of creating localized assortments based on financial objectives.
• Automated planning feature – Enables building out assortment plans automatically, helps identify segment customers by their propensity to buy, and incorporates demographic, geographic, psychographic, and social data via access to the central data repository.
• Cloud deployment – Just Enough is one of the vendors that support AWS, Google and Microsoft cloud implementations.
• Strong international support footprint and a variety of customers around the globe.

• Future roadmap – Focuses on adding intelligent cashflow forecasting, AP automation, additional country extensions, and additional industry-specific functionality.
• Sales and support – Areas of improvement include the provision of solid sales and deployment support, technical support, and training and documentation.

Opaque (request quote)

Vendor Name

Headquarters

Employees

Presence

Blue Yonder

AZ, USA

5001 – 10000+

Private

• Unified planning and execution – A cloud-based offering via its partnership with Microsoft on the Azure platform. Integrates the merchandise financial planning process with the downstream execution systems. It also has an extensive global implementation footprint.
• Single view of assortments – Visualizes a complete season with a holistic view of product offerings and quantitatively measures at aggregated levels like class or category.
• Intelligent, localized assortments – Aligns with customer preferences and has scoring-based recommendations on groups for better localization.
• Enhanced Assortment Frameworks – It leverages AI ML for predictions and leverages multiple data analytics insights to build a firm conceptual plan.

• Future roadmap – Focuses on investments in modernizing its legacy applications and strengthening its ML capabilities.
• Lacks packaged integrations with standard ERPs

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Vendor Name

Headquarters

Employees

Presence

Logility

GA, USA

250 – 500

Private

• Collaborative planning – Logility is a leading provider of SaaS collaborative planning solutions that aid small, medium, large, and Fortune 1000 companies.
• E2E Advanced analytics competencies – Logility is one of the vendors that fully provide all retail assortment management capabilities. It leverages advanced analytics throughout its application suite.
• An extensive implementation footprint and its references showed the highest propensity to select and use it again.
• Cloud deployment & partnerships – Logility is active on AWS for cloud implementations. It has recently partnered with Microsoft Azure to power high-performing cloud environments and enhance the customer experience.

• Future roadmap – Focuses on AI-based solutions. Leveraging ML tools to augment performance and automate planning execution.
• Acquisition of AdapChain is having an impact, and it expects an improvement in this area.
• Aims to merge the solution with its digital supply chain platform to power planning with a view toward the future.

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