SOLUTIONS
Merchandize Financial Planning
Align Inventory Investments with Financial Goals
PartnerLinQ's Merchandise Financial Planning (MFP) is the strategic engine for a profitable retail operation. It moves beyond disjointed spreadsheets to a unified platform that aligns your inventory investments directly with your financial goals.
PartnerLinQ provides complete ecosystem that delivers on this vision through four core capability pillars:
End-to-End
Connectivity
Our out-of-the-box connectors integrate with your ERP, CRM, and SCM systems, and pull in external and partner data, creating a holistic view of the demand signal.
Fully Linked with Forecasting & Demand Planning Towers
PartnerLinQ enables complete integration of forecasting control towers, demand planning with Merchandize financial planning to optimize budgets and manage financial controls effectively.
Agentic AI
Built-in platform AI agents help your organization continuously evolve its demand planning by assisting in retraining of AI models and providing recommendations, enabling an unprecedented pace of adaptation to changing market conditions.
The Composable Enterprise
As a composable platform, PartnerLinQ puts all capabilities directly in the hands of your teams, allowing them to move fast and digitally evolve your processes and solutions in-house with greater autonomy.
Industries
- Retail & Consumer Goods
- Foods & Beverage
- Apparel & Footwear
Features & Capabilities
PartnerLinQ provides a robust set of features to support your immediate and future planning goals, seamlessly integrating with other supply chain functions and extending to your external ecosystem.
- Comprehensive Forecasting: Plan across multiple time horizons to support both tactical and strategic decision-making.
- Hierarchical Planning: Forecast across all dimensions—including product, customer, region, and channel—for a complete view of demand.
- Multi-Unit Forecasting: Plan in different units of measure, such as sales units and pack sizes, to align with your business needs.
- Downstream Planning Integration: The demand signal generated supports end-to-end planning processes, providing a foundation for downstream supply planning and production planning.
- S&OP and S&OE Support: Our platform orchestrates end-to-end processes and approvals with configurable process queues and pre- built templates, ensuring alignment across your organization.
- Intelligence: Account for holidays, promotions, weather impacts, and trends to refine your forecasts with real-world factors.
- Root-Cause Analysis: The system identifies and highlights the sources of forecast error, allowing for corrective adjustments and continuous process improvement.
Unified Workbooks: Enable collaborative planning with role-based inputs, bringing finance, merchandising, and procurement teams into a single shared environment for better alignment.
Workflow Orchestration: Orchestrate approval workflows for key financial decisions, such as budget changes and OTB reconciliations, ensuring transparency and accountability.
Real-Time Visibility: Provide a single source of truth with real-time tracking of budget adherence and financial metrics, eliminating data silos and manual spreadsheet reconciliation.
Scenario Planning: Run "what-if" scenarios for different financial assumptions to test alternative strategies and their impact on profitability.
Financial Variance Analysis: Analyze variances between planned and actual financial performance to understand drivers and take corrective action.
AI-Powered Insights: Leverage AI to provide narrative insights on financial risks and opportunities, helping to explain performance and guide decisions.
Dynamic Visualizations: Gain deep insights with customizable dashboards and reports that provide a clear view of financial performance and trends.
Technology
A solution's technology vision must align with your organization’s future aspirations. PartnerLinQ’s modern, composable architecture ensures a planning solution that is not only powerful today but will scale to meet your evolving needs.
Cloud-Native & Multi-Cloud Architecture: Our scalable, cloud-native architecture is built for demand planning cycles, ensuring fast processing and seamless performance. We support multi-cloud environments, providing the flexibility to align with your organization’s cloud strategy.
Composability: Built on an API-first and microservices architecture, our platform provides the extensibility and flexibility to adapt to your unique needs, helping you achieve a truly composable enterprise.
Intelligent Data Applications Framework: Our framework allows you to easily onboard and enrich external data sets and factors with AI-based predictions, creating a richer input signal for your demand planning process and accelerating the evolution of your digital intelligence with ease
Extensive Prebuilt Adapters: We offer prebuilt, composable integration adapters for over 80 enterprise application platforms, including SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Dynamics Business Central, Manhattan Active Omni and Salesforce.
Seamless Data Flow: Our bi-directional integration capabilities with ERP, POS, Online Commerce, and WMS systems ensure a continuous flow of demand data for a single source of truth.
Trading Partner Network: Our native integration with your trading partner network allows for real-time data capture, ensuring your plans are always informed by the most current market signals.
Custom Algorithm & Model Development: The platform provides a unified environment for in-house development of custom algorithms and models, giving your teams the tools to continuously evolve the solution.
Third-Party Analytic Integration: Easily integrate third-party analytics and leverage public APIs to expand the planning models and connect with external data sources.
Industry Knowledge Graph and Data Models: ParnterLinQ’s industry data models and supply chain knowledge graph instantly enable out of the box reporting, search and planning capabilities to a whole new level of sophistication and extensibility.
User Experience
A powerful solution is only effective if your teams adopt it. PartnerLinQ's intuitive and unified user experience for MFP is designed to drive rapid adoption and empower financial and merchandising teams with the insights they need to make confident decisions.
Unified Experience: All planning activities—from budget allocation and variance analysis to markdown planning and OTB tracking—take place within a single, unified environment. This eliminates the need to switch between disparate spreadsheets and tools.
Interactive Planning Grids: Highly configurable and interactive grids allow planners to personalize dashboards and visualizations, ensuring financial data is presented in the most meaningful way for each role.
- Unified Experience: All planning activities—from data ingestion and analytics to demand planning and workflow configuration—take place within a single, unified environment, eliminating the need for separate tools.
- Interactive Planning Grids: Highly configurable and interactive planning grids allow users to personalize dashboards and visualizations, ensuring data is presented in the most meaningful way for each role.
Autonomous Updates: The platform can apply autonomous plan updates based on predefined thresholds and exceptions, freeing up your team to focus on high-value tasks like strategic analysis and decision-making.
Smart Actions: The system provides actionable recommendations that can be applied with a single click, automating routine decisions and accelerating the financial planning cycle.
Scenario Planning & Versioning: Quickly create and compare multiple budget scenarios and versions to model the financial impact of different strategies, ensuring you can make fast, confident decisions.
Implementation Advantage
Unlike traditional, rigid approaches, PartnerLinQ enables agile and rapid implementation. With our composable platform, prebuilt solution templates, and proven AI models, your company can go live fast, evolve fast, and achieve unprecedented speed to value. Our modern approach makes a highly sophisticated demand planning solution highly affordable, eliminating the long timelines and prohibitive costs of traditional enterprise software. Our proven implementation process is designed for a fast, seamless transition:
- Agile Business Process Mapping: We begin with a collaborative business process analysis and mapping. We use standard templates that can be quickly configured to fit your unique needs and workflows, ensuring the solution fits your organization like a glove.
- Streamlined Data Onboarding: Our composable integration capabilities and prebuilt adapters simplify and accelerate the data loading process. This agile data ingestion, combined with our industry-specific semantic model, ensures data flows to the planning grids in a fluid and streamlined manner.
- Configurable Security & Control: The implementation includes the setup of robust, role-based security and controls. This ensures that downstream integrations and associated actions are tightly governed and aligned with your business rules.
- Expert Guidance & Self-Service: Our expert consulting team leads the implementation and provides comprehensive user enablement. This focuses on building self-service capabilities within your team, ensuring they have the tools and knowledge for continuous digital evolution.
End Result & Business Benefit
PartnerLinQ’s agile implementation process leads directly to rapid value realization and tangible business benefits, including:
- Accelerated Time-to-Value: Go-live happens in weeks, not months or years, allowing you to start realizing ROI and competitive advantage faster.
- Unprecedented Efficiency: Automation of routine tasks, data ingestion, and security configuration allows your teams to focus on strategic planning rather than manual work.
- Scalable Digital Evolution: The composable foundation and self-service enablement empower your business to continuously adapt and evolve without constant reliance on external consultants.
- Reduced Risk: A streamlined, predictable implementation process minimizes disruption and ensures a smooth transition to our new planning environment.
Pricing Model
PartnerLinQ provides overall business value and industry specific cutting technology solutions for both current and future needs. We offer a modern pricing model that provides predictability and transparency, empowering your business to invest with confidence.
- Tiered, Usage-Based Pricing: Our model is simple and transparent. You only pay for the tier that matches your actual transaction volume each month, so you are only ever paying for what you use.
- Unified & Transparent Cost: Our unified pricing covers all core capabilities—including integration, data processing, the planning application, and the embedded AI—eliminating hidden costs.
- Simplified Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): By consolidating all key functions into a single, usage-based model, we eliminate the hidden costs of managing multiple vendors and disparate systems, ensuring your investment delivers both immediate and sustainable business value.
PartnerLinQ gives you the precision, agility, and control to turn seasonal volatility into a competitive advantage.
Contact us to schedule a demo and see the difference.
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FAQs
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