What we do
- Assortment planning — AI-driven range & depth
- Store-level allocation — constraint-based, demand-driven
- SKU × store demand forecasting
- Catalog ingestion & normalization
RETAIL PLANNING — A FIELD GUIDE
Retail Planning, explained —
Retail Planning, explained —
and where Assort Agent fits
Retail planning is the umbrella discipline that turns commercial strategy into product on shelf. It is broader than any single tool. This page maps the four layers of the modern retail planning stack, the decisions each layer owns, and an honest view of where Assort Agent contributes — and where it deliberately does not.
We do: Assortment planning
We do: Store-level allocation
The four layers of retail planning
Retailers describe their planning stack differently, but most converge on four layers. Each layer has its own owners, cadence, and tooling. Understanding them is the fastest way to know which problem you are actually trying to solve before you buy software.
1. Merchandise financial planning (MFP)
The top-down financial layer: sales, margin, inventory turn, and open-to-buy (OTB) targets by category and season. Owned by planning & finance, with input from buying. Output: a season-level financial plan that every downstream layer must respect. Assort Agent does not do MFP — it integrates with whatever MFP system you use.
2. Assortment planning
Translating budgets into a specific range — styles, depth, size and color curves, brand mix. This is where retail strategy becomes a product list. Read the deep dive: assortment planning. This is one of the two layers Assort Agent is built for.
3. Allocation planning
Distributing the assortment to individual stores based on demand, capacity, and clusters. Most retailers leak material margin here because flat allocation under-supplies winners and over-supplies stragglers. See store-level allocation. This is the second layer Assort Agent is built for.
4. Replenishment & in-season management
Reacting to demand as it reveals itself: re-flowing stock, marking down, expediting newness, feeding learnings back into next season. Assort Agent's allocation outputs feed your replenishment system; we don't replace it.
Retail planning vs assortment planning
| Dimension | Retail planning | Assortment planning |
|---|---|---|
| Scope | Strategy → execution, full season | Range & depth for a season |
| Output | OTB, financial plan, calendar | SKU list, depth, store-cluster plan |
| Owner | Planning & finance | Merchandising & buying |
| Tooling | MFP / OTB systems | Assortment software like Assort Agent |
Where AI is changing retail planning
Three shifts are reshaping retail planning: ML-based demand forecasting at SKU × store granularity, constraint-based optimization that respects merchandising rules, and agentic workflows that compress weeks of planner time into minutes. The biggest leverage tends to sit at the assortment and allocation layers — which is exactly where Assort Agent focuses.
Retail planning for India
Indian retail is not one market. A 1,200 sq ft store in tier-3 Tamil Nadu and a 6,000 sq ft store in BKC, Mumbai share a brand and little else. Festival demand spikes for Diwali, Onam, Pongal, Eid, and Durga Puja are non-trivial and regional. A retail planning stack that treats India as homogeneous will leak margin every season. Assortment and allocation systems must handle this granularity natively — which is how Assort Agent is built.
What Assort Agent does today — and what's coming next
Not yet — on the roadmap
- Merchandise financial planning / OTB
- End-to-end retail planning suite
- Replenishment execution
- Native POS / ERP / WMS modules — we integrate today, deeper modules planned
See it on your retail data
If assortment planning or store-level allocation is your bottleneck, we'll walk you through Assort Agent on a sample of your catalog.
Contact sales