Understanding the Differences Between Line Planning and Assortment Planning

Line Planning vs Assortment Planning: What’s the Difference?

Mainly involving the merchandising team with some input from design and sourcing teams, line planning is a process that ensures that retailers have the right mix of products to meet customer demand and achieve sales targets. It generates a product assortment plan that outlines the product categories, styles, colors, and sizes that a retailer will offer for a particular season or time .

Before the line planning process takes place, the merchandising team must also prepare the financial strategy otherwise known as the Merchandise Financial Plan (MFP) which will determine the Open-to-Buy (OTB) budget. These various processes, all so crucial to one another, all take place in a myriad of different systems, tools and spreadsheets.

Traditionally, the line planning process takes place across a plethora of notations on foam core boards, notepads, sticky notes, from data compiled from multiple systems such as PLM, ERPs, spreadsheets and BPF tools, and accompanied by physical samples and swatches; all requiring manual management and compilation.

Assortment planning follows on from the product assortment plan and determines the breadth/width of specific products from that collection to offer in alignment with the merchandise financial plan across individual stores and channels. Involving merchandisers, planners and buyers, the purpose of assortment planning is to determine which product mix will maximize sales and profitability by store and/or channel.

The product assortment plan provides a blueprint for assortment planning. Unlike line planning, which is a largely visual process done by hand, the assortment plan is constructed using huge amounts of financial and numerical data pulled from, updated, and re-entered back into a multitude of systems and tools such as spreadsheets, budgeting and planning tools.

It is inevitable that such a crucial process requiring such attention to detail and taking place across multiple locations with different stakeholders will leave misalignment between the three processes, resulting in lost time and information.

Line Planning and Assortment Planning Challenges

When these processes operate in disconnected systems or rely heavily on manual workflows, merchandising teams can struggle to translate high-level product strategies into optimized assortments. The result can be wasted time, communication gaps, missed opportunities and difficulty making confident decisions about which products to offer, where to offer them and in what quantities. Here are some of the common signs that your line planning and assortment planning processes may need to be better connected:

Merchandisers Are Losing Time in Spreadsheets

When line planning, merchandise financial planning (MFP) and assortment planning are managed across different tools, merchandising teams may need to manually transfer product assortment plans between systems or spreadsheets before allocating products to individual stores, channels or locations. This creates a hugely manual and error-prone process that takes valuable time away from strategic merchandising activities.

Communication Breakdowns Are Causing Delays

When teams involved in line planning and assortment planning don't have a centralized source of accurate, up-to-date data, it becomes more difficult to collaborate and make informed decisions. Disconnected information can lead to miscommunication, duplicated work, errors and rework, ultimately slowing down the planning process and making it harder for teams to respond quickly to changing market conditions.

Product Performance Is Falling Short

When sales and forecast data isn't aligned with product-related information from a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system, retailers can struggle to connect product performance with the decisions made during planning. This can make it harder to identify emerging trends, respond to changing customer preferences or make timely adjustments to the assortment. The result may be underperforming products, missed revenue opportunities and potential damage to brand reputation.

Optimizing the Product Mix Is Difficult

No matter how hard your teams work, the product mix may never seem quite right. Creating customer-centric assortments by drop, store, channel or location requires large amounts of data to analyze, segment and plan effectively. Without advanced planning tools, merchandisers can struggle to identify the right products for each market and channel, making it more difficult to build assortments that align with customer demand and strategic business goals.

Balancing Assortments Is a Constant Challenge

Making informed decisions about product mix and SKU rationalization is difficult when teams are working from rows of numerical data across spreadsheets and disconnected reports. Product imagery can be critical for visualizing how items will work together within an assortment, but it isn't always readily accessible within traditional planning workflows. Without a connected view of product, sales and forecast data, it can also be difficult to identify which products are performing well early enough to decide which colorways, fabrics or styles to drop, carry over or expand.

Connect Line Planning and Assortment Planning with Centric Solutions

By connecting line planning, Merchandise Financial Planning (MFP) and assortment planning, retailers can create a more seamless path from product strategy to store- and channel-level assortments. Bringing product, sales, financial and forecast data together gives merchandising and planning teams the visibility they need to understand demand, identify opportunities and make faster, more informed decisions about which products to offer, where to offer them and when.

Achieving this level of alignment can be challenging when these processes are managed across disconnected systems, spreadsheets and planning tools. Teams may spend significant time transferring data between systems, reconciling information and manually updating plans. This not only creates opportunities for errors and delays but can also make it difficult to maintain a clear, up-to-date view of the product assortment throughout the planning process.

Centric Planning & Pricing brings critical planning processes together in a connected, intuitive solution. By connecting line planning and assortment planning with accurate product, financial, sales and forecast data, teams can move from high-level assortment decisions to detailed store- and channel-level planning with greater speed and confidence.

With Centric Planning & Pricing, merchandisers and planners can analyze product performance and demand, build and refine assortments and evaluate different planning scenarios in one connected environment. This makes it easier to understand the potential impact of assortment decisions, optimize the product mix and align assortments with financial and business objectives.

A connected approach also gives teams greater flexibility to plan assortments by store, channel, market or other relevant attributes. Rather than relying on disconnected reports and spreadsheets to determine which products, colors or styles to carry, teams can use current data and forecasts to make more informed decisions about what to introduce, carry over or rationalize.

The result is a more collaborative and efficient planning process. By reducing manual data transfer and creating greater visibility across line planning and assortment planning, Centric Planning & Pricing enables retailers to spend less time managing disconnected data and more time making strategic merchandising decisions.

When line plans and assortment plans aren't aligned, retailers can face wasted time, communication gaps, poorly balanced assortments and missed opportunities. Centric Planning & Pricing connects these intertwined processes to give teams the data, visibility and planning capabilities they need to build more targeted assortments and bring the right products to the right markets at the right time.