Eliminating spreadsheets with powerful, flexible, integrated planning solutions

Retailers and brands that use spreadsheets for planning typically spend most of the week getting spreadsheets ready before they can plan the following week, and waste even more time with each transition from one season or year to the next. For retailers that have invested in a planning system, keeping the planning system up with changing business needs is so time-consuming and expensive most companies don’t do it. Spreadsheets proliferate. Time and energy is wasted. Errors creep in. There is no longer “one source of truth” for planning the business.

Enter Predictix. We designed our planning applications so that it’s quick and easy to continually adapt them to your changing business. Say goodbye to spreadsheets.

A planning solution that evolves with your business

Predictix Planning starts with standard configurations that reflect a solid “base” for planning. From there, you make your plans your own. We make your planners an integral, ongoing part of the solution design, iterating with us on the look and feel of your planning application from day one. Within a few weeks, you have a first cut at your planning processes that your users can try out, critique, and build on. We then iterate together until your solution is just right.

We can do this because we don’t hard code your planning processes; we configure them in our live environment. As we make changes, they’re visible in the planning view itself, so you get immediate feedback on what works and what doesn’t. All of this makes Predictix Planning implementations much faster, and the results much better, when you go live and as you evolve your business, than those that rely on traditional approaches.

A comprehensive planning suite

Predictix delivers fully integrated modules to meet the needs of the most sophisticated retailers and brands. Predictix Planning brings your entire planning process into one workflow and allows users to collaborate with allocation, replenishment, and pricing to ensure consistent data is driving business decisions.

• Strategic planning
• Merchandise financial planning
• Category management
• Item planning
• Location/Store planning
• Location/Store clustering and grading
• Assortment planning
• Size/Pre-Pack optimization
• Assortment and Space optimization

Distinctive advantages over traditional planning solutions

Predictix overcomes the limitations of earlier technologies, and help retailers stand out in an ever more competitive market. We highlight just a few of our unique and differentiated features here:

• Clustering dynamically and on-demand
• Attribute and logic-based filtering and aggregation
• Dynamic attributes and hierarchies
• Support for integrated, iterative planning process
• Placeholders to define assortments

Unmatched experience in planning

Our clients appreciate that we truly understand both their day-to-day challenges and how to deliver solutions to meet them. Our team of planning specialists gained their experience at some of the largest and most highly respected retailers.

Optimized and localized assortments
for every store and every space

Common assortment and space techniques put a mix of products on shelves, but don’t put the best mix of products on shelves:

• Assortment and space decisions are linear and disconnected
  
• Categories behave differently within a store - store level clustering misses this
  
• “Assort by sales” and “earn your space” ignore product substitutability and uniqueness
• Typical tools ignore demand forecasts, cross-item effects, and replenishment requirements
  
• Force-fitting assortments to smaller POGs does not produce optimized assortments
  
• Optimizing while complying with business rules and objectives is very difficult if not impossible to do manually

For these reasons, Predictix felt a new approach to assortment and space optimization was needed. One with a sophisticated understanding of customer demand, of the complexities of widely varying spaces, and of retailers' business objectives. An approach that would optimize across all of these, and let retailers finalize their assortments with real-time feedback on the impact of their decisions. To accomplish all of this, we delivered Predictix Assortment & Space Optimization (ASO).

Predictix ASO: A more effective approach to assortment & space optimization

Predictix ASO achieves truly optimized, localized assortments for every store, every category, and every POG by introducing many distinctive and unique approaches; we highlight a few below:

• Uses actual consumer buying patterns at the category level within each store as a starting point
• Takes into account demand, cross-item effects (substitutability, brand loyalty, lifestyle preferences, cannibalization), replenishment, and other inputs
• Lets users define business rules and objectives that must be met within the context of an optimized assortment
• Produces an optimized assortment for each and every store and each and every planogram
• Provides real time financial forecasts of the assortment

Predictix ASO drives higher sales and margins

Retailers can expect category margins to improve 100 basis points or more, and to drive higher sales, from optimizing their assortments with Predictix ASO. On a qualitative level, customer satisfaction improves by having more robust assortments within the stores’ existing space. Retailers can also consistently meet their category objectives and enforce desired rules without needlessly sacrificing sales or margins, since the Predictix ASO solution explicitly takes all business rules, objectives, and constraints into account when optimizing each individual assortment.