i2 Buying and Assortment Management

Enables buying and planning from the early conceptual stage to the final creation of market-tailored store assortments.

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i2 Buying and Assortment Management

With customer loyalty decreasing and margins under pressure, competition among retailers is more intense than ever. To increase market share, retailers must move from a product-centric strategy to a customer-centric assortment strategy that focuses on efficiency, selection, and customer preference.

i2 Buying and Assortment Management™ (BAM) is the industry’s most comprehensive purchasing and planning solution. Built on the i2 platform, this interactive suite of tools supports key processes in assortment management—from the creation of placeholder concepts to the generation of purchase orders representing buys that are properly timed, packed, and aligned with merchandise management objectives.

i2 BAM creates receipt plans driven by sales strategies that are simultaneously reconciled to several merchandise management objectives, including financial targets, customer preferences, space constraints, and inventory performance. The tool provides continuous visibility into the effect of assortment decisions on key result areas, providing the user with powerful “what-if” analysis capabilities in a familiar and comfortable user interface environment—Microsoft Excel®.

A Customer-Centric Approach

i2 BAM supports the unique mix of art and science needed to build effective, customer-centric assortments, ensuring plan feasibility and simultaneous alignment with multiple objectives and constraints. The solution includes:

Historical performance
Buyer’s worksheet
Space planning
Customer-centric assortment
Sales and receipt planning

Solution Capabilities

Historical performance analytics
A buyer’s repository of item, attribute, and sourcing information
Assortments by store and group with product, store, and shelf attributes
Easily interpreted summary to help reconcile performance to merchandise plan
Continuous monitoring of assortment decisions on space, product mix, and other objectives
Fully automated in-season planning with adaptive forecasting
Analytical support to identify key assortment planning parameters
Historical summary and in-line views to support improved planning and distribution decisions
The ability to plan price points across locations by time period
Dummy style and colors for “what-if” planning with supporting workflows

i2 Differentiators

This tool is built on the i2 platform, which incorporates a reference data model, a service-oriented process layer for business logic and data access interfaces, and a presentation layer that includes both Microsoft Excel and browser-based user interface elements.

Benefits of i2 BAM include:

Improved customer centricity with targeted assortments for local markets
Support for targeted markdown decisions to maximize margin and minimize leftover inventory
Scientific approach to pattern after intelligence and seasonal sales profiling that enhances
the art of preseason sales forecasting
Optimization of receipt flows to enable lower supply chain costs and improve product
allocation decisions
Integration of processes across buying and assortment planning
Quick return on investment by deploying only required, high-value components that fit within existing systems landscape or a phased implementation of modules; there’s no need to “rip and replace” or deploy all modules at once

How can we help you?

Success Story

“We looked at and talked to a lot of different companies, but when we first met i2, we saw that their vision for how to manage a retail business was key to our success in implementing the new technology.” —Matt Salmonson Senior Vice President, Inventory Management

i2 Buying and Assortment Management