Centric Planning and Pricing — AI-powered retail decision engine
Plan and Price Assortments and Manage Inventory for Whole-Lifecycle Demand
Unify merchandise financial planning, assortment strategy, lifecycle pricing and inventory flow to align retail strategies with real-time trading reality.
Create margin-led strategies based on live market signals with embedded AI-powered demand forecasting and performance insights.
Optimize pricing across product lifecycles with smarter initial prices, targeted promotions and optimized markdown timing to maximize sell-through and protect profit.
Global brands, retailers and manufacturers create, launch and commercialize better products at higher margins with Centric Planning & Pricing.
Plan smarter for greater predictability, faster time to market and higher full-price sell-through rates
Bring the right products to market at the right prices to guarantee strong margins. Leverage AI-driven forecasts with real-time demand and market trends to optimize seasonal launch windows, sell more stock at full price, and reduce excess inventory, discounts and stockouts across global retail estates.
100%
Greater operating margins
5%
Gross profit improvement
20%
Greater stock availability
75%
Shorter planning cycles
Integrate planning, pricing and inventory from top-line or business level strategy to in-market execution
Align assortment plans and prices with overall financial targets and real-time performance for more efficient OTBs and higher overall ROI.
Foster collaboration across teams and functions with a single platform for the entire product lifecycle—not just financial planning.
Update in-season prices to meet demand fluctuations while minimizing discounts with integrated financial planning, inventory flow tracking and smart pricing models.
Leading brands and retailers see real results with Centric Software
We used to manage assortment planning and MFP using spreadsheets, but this limited us to high-level plans. Centric Planning allows us to get to a more granular level and create data-driven plans and assortments. It will also standardize and rationalize planning as we scale up.
In terms of bringing the products that will drive us forward, drive growth and take us into the future, Centric ticks those boxes for us.
Before COVID, we had a 5.6% operating margin at the end of fiscal year 2020. We closed this past year at 12%. It is a huge improvement in profits! ...If we had had a lot of inventory, we could not have done it. Centric Planning has been an enabler to truly follow our strategy and increase our profitability in a very, very big way.
With Centric Planning, we have the tools we need for our sales team and partners to be more efficient, to support rapid strategic decision-making and to have full visibility of seasonal performance and budgets. Having the same tools available for our teams is critical when you are expanding into new markets.
With the new Centric Planning solution, buying and merchandising teams can work more collaboratively and are saving time because manual data entry has been eliminated. Being able to create what-if scenarios empowers teams to make strategic decisions faster and achieve sales and margin targets.
Hear how ABOUT YOU Streamlined their Merchandise Financial Planning Process with Centric Planning
With Centric, we now have a single point of truth approach where everything is for the planners to do their job and the buyers to do their job. It supports collaborative work. The teams are working more efficiently and more effectively because there are parts of the tool you’d never be able to do using spreadsheets because assortments are so large. Planners are now able to take more responsibility and work with other stakeholders in ways they simply couldn’t in the past.
We have reduced our price reductions by about 2.5%. That translates into a 1% margin increase, which, on a 300 million-euro turnover, is a 3 million-euro increase to our bottom line. That’s quite a lot; more than we were expecting at the beginning of the project.
Built for the complexity and challenges of real industries and global markets
Fashion and apparel
Boost margins and cut in- and out-of-season planning times with smarter initial pricing and whole-lifecycle adjustments based on unified data and AI-powered insights for market intelligence, competitive positioning and real-time performance.
Footwear
Bring the right products to market in the right places faster with assortment planning and pricing that’s right for business goals, consumer pockets and real-world commercial reality—without the risk of costly course-corrections, stockouts and performance upsets.
Outdoor and sports
Protect profitability and competitive positioning with fully integrated financial planning, inventory management and real-time pricing across markets and assortments. Ensure margin-first approaches with accurate costing at the component, unit and assortment level.
Home and furniture
Boost business agility and bring more products to more markets faster with a single platform for connected planning, pricing and inventory flow management. Price to support margins, future R&D and stock needs with AI-driven consumer preference insights.
Multi-category retail
Optimize prices to boost margin against COGS. Create strategies that keep consumers satisfied across markets with real-time intelligence and AI-powered insights that supports predictable profits across product lifecycles while cutting discounts and inventory.
Take 60 minutes to see Centric Planning and Pricing in action
Connect with retail-first planning and pricing specialists and demo CPP to learn a smarter approach to profit-first strategy.
Frequently asked questions
Product Value & Differentiation
Merchandising and Financial Planning (MFP) tools aren’t one size fits all, so their capabilities will vary greatly depending on their ideal customer profile. Most MFP tools are finance team tools designed with top-down financial planning in mind: the finance team sets a target for the whole enterprise based on historic merchandising data and this filters down to the merchandise planning team for translation into commercial targets. These are then further adjusted based on Weekly Sales Stock and Intake (WSSI) based on granular reporting and planning at individual locations.
Where Centric Planning and Pricing differs from this traditional model is in whole-lifecycle integration. While traditional models rely on a top-down approach to setting targets based on often incomplete historical data, CPP creates a connected planning environment for financial targets, assortments, pricing and inventory management in which planning, demand and inventory are connected and AI-driven forecasting and recommendations support better decision making from day one. This allows brands and retailers to create initial and whole-lifecycle planning and pricing strategies that stabilize and increase margins and provide more predictable revenue streams across markets—while also supporting faster decision making and dramatically reduced planning cycle times.
Lifecycle pricing in CPP has been developed specifically for the needs of retail-focused organizations. Integrated data sources empower teams to develop the optimal price for seasonal and evergreen products from launch. This means initial prices are set with eventual markdowns in mind, allowing for more predictable margin projections that account for “depreciation” according to different lifecycle stages.
This is further supported by dynamic pricing capacity—teams can instantly adjust e-commerce pricing for infinite-stock items based on market reactions and associated elasticity modeling. Integration with Centric Market Intelligence allows for the comparison of prices against competitors for key items and automate price changes in response to competitor strategies.
Centric customers report that their teams can typically cut their budget preparation times in half. Beyond this, overall planning cycle time can be reduced by as much as 75% thanks to the availability of robust real-time data and AI-assisted predictive and prescriptive insights.
Take 60 minutes to see Centric Software in action
Connect with retail-first planning and pricing specialists and demo CPP to learn a smarter approach to profit-first strategy.