While preparing for an uncertain future, it's important to map out multiple scenarios and project the impact of each outcome. Especially today, as the Corona Virus has implications on operational restrictions and consumer behavior that change almost daily, a merchandise planner needs to constantly evaluate different scenarios and adopt new plans on the fly. Given this increased need to maintain planning agility, we're excited to announce Toolio’s new scenario playing feature.
Summary
Toolio's Scenario Playing feature serves two main purposes: planning for multiple scenarios at the same time and snapshotting old plans to access them later in time. With Excel, this would require you to have duplicate plan spreadsheets or have multiple plan versions (such as original plan, working plan, last forecast, etc.) all living in separate worksheets.
Use Cases
- A planning team is maintaining two scenarios, a second lock-down scenario and a conservative scenario, which you maintain as the Master Plan.
- You have committed to an Original Plan at the beginning of the plan year. You want to save it as a reference, and want to see how the Master Plan is comparing to the Original Plan.
- You are re-forecasting on a monthly basis, and want to freeze each month's plan as a snapshot. You are not planning to maintain previous months' plans, but want to keep them available as reference and compare your current plan to a previous month’s plan.
Capabilities
In Toolio, the main plan the team is working on is called the Master Plan. At any point, you can create different scenarios off of the Master Plan and give that scenario a name. Your changes within that scenario will not impact the plan you have on the Master Plan.
At any point, you can choose to see multiple scenarios at the same time and compare the new scenario to the Master Plan. Lastly, if you choose to update the Master Plan with a new scenario you are working on, you can always promote that scenario to the Master Plan.
Walkthrough
Please see the video below for how scenario playing works in action.
