Planning & Buying optimization

SITUATION

Objective:  Allocate the merchandise purchasing budget for upcoming seasons (identify biggest gaps between current plans and where demand lies) to optimize inventory turnover and maximize profits.

Situation:​

• Fast-growing online retailer with difficult demand to predict year-over-year given rapid growth rate
• The % of collection sold at full price during regular season needs to be improved (vs. selling at a discount during liquidation season)

APPROACH

• Performed in-depth post mortem analyses of previous seasons, including plans vs. purchases vs. receipts vs. sales at SKU level
• Conducted product cluster analyses based on inventory turnover and gross margin
• Carried out Pareto analyses to identify top product contributors vs. bottom ones
• Analyzed product out-of-stocks and overstocks vs. retail industry benchmarks

DELIVERABLES

• Scenario analyses to identify improvement opportunities by product gender, department, brand, category
• Recommendations on how to spend open-to-buy budget for upcoming seasons with products to keep / reassess / remove based on analyses
• Recommendations on how to improve out-of-stock and overstock ratios to bridge the gap with retail industry benchmarks
• Created Planning & Buying dashboard with metrics to track