Assortment management is one of the most important aspects of any retail or wholesale business. It involves making decisions and managing product life cycles, product data, customer requests, and store locations, among other things. Handling all this requires a user-friendly system.
In SUPERMIND, the assortment is managed by linking the assortments of products and locations (e.g. stores) with each other. Any store can be linked to one or more assortments, and any assortment can be linked to one or more stores.
Benefits
- Automatic calculation of business figures and categories to support assortment decisions
- Easy and efficient user interface
- Ability to manage store and product assortments in one place
The system displays various business figures, such as profit margins, turnover, the combined stock balance and inventory values of all stores, balance and assortment coverage, etc. For example, the balance coverage figure tells you directly how many stores currently have a certain product in stock. Making changes to the assortments is easy and efficient when you have all the relevant information in one place.
Assortment management features
SUPERMIND contains versatile tools that can be used to manage various changes to the assortments or product life cycle. Assortment data can also be imported from an existing ERP or POS system.
Decisions
When you decide to include a product in your selection, you have to determine the scope of the assortment: whether the product will only be available in the online store, in the shelf selection of a limited number of stores, or in the order selection – or perhaps in all of these. In addition, you have to decide when the assortment period starts, and whether the product will be available temporarily or indefinitely.
There is often a need to change the scope of the product assortment, for example, due to changes in demand. Correspondingly, relocations, changes in store displays, or any other decision can mean a change in the store’s assortment.
The results of ABC/XYZ analysis can be used to support assortment decisions. SUPERMIND analyzes and groups items based on sales margins, turnover, predictability, sales volumes, and even the number of customers. SUPERMIND’s ABC/XYZ segmentation algorithm is arguably the most versatile on the market.
Life-cycle management
The decisions on the start, length and end of the assortment period are part of life-cycle management. Life-cycle management also includes the decision to remove a product from the selection (product discontinuations), the planning of controlled phase-out, and planning the sell-off of remaining stocks of discontinued products.
Read more: Life-cycle management
Seasonal inventory management
Many products are seasonal, so their demand or availability varies according to the time of year. In SUPERMIND, seasons can be managed separately, and seasonal products can be automatically removed from the selections during the off-season.
Read more: Seasonal inventory management
Rules
The store and product assortments can be linked to each other by certain rules. For example, you can specify that products belonging to the basic selection belong to the shelf selection of all stores.
For example, products belonging to the Basic selection could be linked to the Small store, Medium-sized store, and Large store assortment categories, and products belonging to the Supermarket selection could only be linked to medium-sized and large stores. You can add as many assortment categories as you want, and they can be named freely.
After the linking, the system shows how many stores have a certain product in their selection and, correspondingly, how many products are included in the selection of individual stores.
Additional information
SUPERMIND predicts the demand for the products in each store and creates automatic replenishment orders based on the forecasts. If you’d like to know more, check out the links below.
Demand forecasting
Automated replenishment
Would you like to know more?
We would love to show you how SUPERMIND works and what the results look like. We believe we can convince you in just one hour. Contact our team and book a demo meeting with us!
Petri Lindholm
+358 400 420 583
[email protected]