Recording & summary 📽️

My Notes 📒

She identifies two key elements often missing from most merchandising platforms:

WSSI (Weekly Sales and Stock Intake): It provides a comprehensive overview of actual sales, forecasted sales, stock levels and value, budget, and more at all levels of detail. This tool is essential for viewing data at a topline level from a high-level perspective, which can then be drilled down to more granular levels (category, product, SKUs) on a weekly and monthly basis.
Reporting:
- Daily: Sales review covering cash & unit, gross & net.
- Weekly: Inventory position to identify opportunities and threats, such as sell-through rates, fast vs. slow-moving stock, online vs. store sales, product issues, and potential marketing needs.
- Monthly: Comparison of demand forecasts versus actuals, along with inventory cost and budget reviews.

Planning Process:
- She uses a bottom-up approach to planning, starting with a revenue target from finance and setting her own targets. They then meet to agree on a final target.
  - Example: Finance might anticipate high summer sales, but she might predict higher sales from September onwards due to upcoming product lines or deliveries.
- She allocates targets at the category and product levels (product = item and color) based on her expertise.
  - On Prediko: She needs to see the entire product set in one view for effective planning, rather than viewing items individually.
  - Observation: Today our customers prefer basing their entire plan on revenue expectations, highlighting different needs between experienced merchandisers at larger brands and founders at smaller brands.
- She wants a system like Prediko to distribute targets at the SKU level (SKU = product, color, and size).
  - Core products: Distribution based on historical trends and seasonality.
  - New products: Distribution based on existing product selection or manual input for entirely new categories.
- She reforecasts weekly based on the latest sales and inventory data (as detailed in the Analysis section).

Budgeting Process:
- At the start of the year, she divides existing inventory into two categories: 1) inventory to retain for the next year and 2) inventory to mark down or clear out.
- Using the WSSI, she tracks:
  1. The value of inventory on hand at the year's start.
  2. The amount of inventory needed to meet future demand, highlighting inventory gaps.
  3. The quantity of inventory to purchase.
- This analysis determines expected inventory costs, which she presents to the finance team for approval. After discussion, they finalize the budget.
- Based on the budget, she revisits her WSSI to identify products for markdown, such as low sellers, to allocate more budget for best sellers. This process ensures she can manage inventory effectively within budget constraints.