SOLUTIONS
Open to Buy (OTB)
Planning
Enforce financial discipline and manage budgets
PartnerLinQ's Open-to-Buy (OTB) Planning solution is the critical control mechanism that enforces financial discipline across your merchandising process. It moves the OTB function from a static spreadsheet to a real-time, dynamic tool for managing merchandise budgets and ensuring cash flow optimization.
PartnerLinQ provides complete ecosystem that delivers on this vision through four core capability pillars:
End-to-End
Connectivity
Seamlessly link planned budgets to real-time purchase orders and actual sales data, closing the loop between finance and procurement.
Unified Data
Model
OTB data resides on the same platform as demand forecasts and inventory plans, ensuring all financial decisions are based on a single source of truth.
AI-Driven
Intelligence
Leverage the accuracy of the Forecast Accuracy % to provide more reliable OTB projections and variance alerts.
Composability & Flexibility
The modular architecture allows the OTB solution to be configured for specific categories, regions, or channels based on your unique financial structure.
Industries
- Retail & Consumer Goods
- Apparel & Footwear
- Speciality & Accessories
Features & Capabilities
PartnerLinQ provides the necessary features for robust and dynamic OTB management, ensuring financial planning directly controls inventory purchasing.
Dual-Level Budget Management: Manage OTB at both the strategic pre-season level and the tactical in-season level, providing continuous control over working capital.
Real-Time Variance Alerts: Proactive alerts notify planners of budget breaches or potential under-investment, allowing for immediate reconciliation and action.
OTB Reconciliation Tools: Tools to quickly reconcile planned budgets with actual sales performance and inventory receipts, improving accuracy and speed.
Integrated Markdown Planning: Link OTB targets directly to markdown forecasts, ensuring financial discipline is maintained while managing product phase-outs
Shared OTB Workbooks: Enable collaborative planning where Finance sets the strategic OTB limits, and Buyers track real-time utilization, ensuring mutual transparency.
Workflow Orchestration: Govern the process for requesting and approving OTB adjustments, maintaining financial control and an auditable trail.
Transparent Budget Overrides: Visibility into budget adjustments with clear documentation on why an OTB limit was modified and by whom.
OTB Utilization Tracking: Continuously track the core metric of OTB Utilization % to ensure responsible inventory investment.
Budget Adherence Reporting: Monitor Budget Adherence % across categories and channels to identify areas of risk or overspending.
Financial Impact Analysis: Analyze the correlation between OTB compliance and the Markdown % Reduction to quantify the financial benefit of the solution.
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
The user experience for OTB Planning is designed to make complex financial controls intuitive and actionable for both financial and merchandising teams.
Unified Budget Dashboard: A single dashboard provides a clear, real-time view of planned OTB, actual utilization, and remaining budget, eliminating the need for manual calculations.
Interactive OTB Grids: Highly configurable grids allow planners to view and adjust OTB by various hierarchies (category, region), ensuring data is presented in a meaningful financial context.
Generative AI Insights: GenAI provides narrative summaries explaining why a variance alert was triggered (e.g., "OTB breach due to higher-than-forecasted receipts and slower Sell-Through % in the core category").
Natural Language Query (NLQ): Use PartnerLinQ.IQ to quickly ask, "What is our remaining Open-to-Buy for the Q4 Women’s Apparel line?" for instant, accurate answers.
Autonomous Variance Alerts: The platform automatically monitors against predefined financial thresholds, freeing planners to focus on strategic analysis rather than routine monitoring.
Quick Reconciliation Actions: Smart actions allow planners to apply adjustments or approve reconciliation moves with a single click, accelerating the monthly or weekly OTB review cycle.
Implementation Advantage
Our agile implementation ensures you quickly establish a reliable, controlled OTB environment, translating into immediate financial discipline and cost savings.
- Agile Business Process Mapping: We utilize prebuilt templates optimized for best-practice OTB workflows, focusing on rapid configuration of your specific financial calendars and approval hierarchies.
- Streamlined Data Onboarding: Integration capabilities accelerate the ingestion of core financial data: sales, receipts, inventory, and planned budgets from ERP/Financial systems, ensuring the OTB model is reliable from day one.
- Configurable Security & Control: Implementation ensures tight, role-based governance over OTB settings, restricting who can adjust budget limits and approve variances, maintaining internal financial control.
- Expert Guidance & Self-Service: Our consulting team provides comprehensive enablement focused on training your teams to manage real-time variance reconciliation, policy setting, and reporting, fostering financial self-sufficiency.
End Result & Business Benefit
PartnerLinQ’s OTB Planning solution enforces financial discipline, leading to direct savings and improved profitability across the retail enterprise.
- Stronger Financial Control: Achieve a high Budget Adherence % and predictable cash flow by controlling merchandise spending at a granular level.
- Reduced Markdown Risk: The solution ensures better inventory utilization, directly contributing to a lower Markdown % Reduction by preventing the overbuying of inventory.
- Optimal Inventory Investment: Ensure available capital is targeted toward high-demand products, maximizing the potential return on every inventory dollar spent.
- Accelerated Financial Cycles: Streamlined reconciliation and autonomous alerts speed up the monthly financial close and OTB review process, improving organizational agility.
Pricing Model
PartnerLinQ provide overall business value and the 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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