When planning for the future, it’s important to consider your performance in the past. As you set growth and improvement goals for a future period of time, more often than not, the targets or KPIs you set are tied to improvements above your historical performance e.g. MOM or YOY sales, margin contribution, etc.
Summary
When you are building a new Merchandise Plan in Toolio, Seeding allows you to populate your current plan with historical data or a plan from the past in order to jump-start your plan creation process. By seeding from the past, you can save time and easily inherit historical seasonality curves, product mixes and important ratios like Markdown % and Return %. This way, you don't have to manually recalculate these values for the current plan you are building from scratch.
Use Case
Say you are building out a new Merchandise Plan for your organization. Your plan for this year will likely relatively resemble your plan or performance from last year, but you will want to change your sales, margin and inventory targets to account for planned growth and inventory utilization improvements you plan to make this year. In addition, you may also adjust the spread between your product mix this year as you account for new product introductions or special promotions. In order to Seed data from the past, you select:
- The type of historical data you want to Seed from the past - Actuals or Plan
- The year in which you would like to Seed data from - 2018, 2019, etc.
- The time frame in which you would like to Seed the data - (Year, Half, Quarter, or Month)
Once you specify this information, it will bring all of the relevant historical actual (performance) or plan data from the past into your plan from this year. Then, you can make adjustments to those metrics based on absolute numbers, % Plan to LY or % of Total.
Below are a few other use-cases:
- Building an annual plan where using LY or LLY as a reference
- Building out a quarterly plan while using previous quarter as a reference
- Building out a plan for a new class, say flats, from the plan or the actuals of an existing class
Capabilities
- Seed based on a previous plan years’ actuals or plan
- Select the source and destination time-frame (e.g. year, quarter, month) for seeding
- Seed from and to a subset of your plan via filtering by attributes
Walkthrough
