SOLUTIONS
Retail Assortment
Planning
Build customer and channel-specific assortments
PartnerLinQ's Retail Assortment Planning solution is engineered to maximize sell-through and service levels by moving beyond one-size-fits-all product mixes. We leverage advanced segmentation and AI to create highly localized, customer- and channel-specific assortments that drive higher profitability.
PartnerLinQ provides complete ecosystem that delivers on this vision through four core capability pillars:
End-to-End
Connectivity
Seamlessly integrate the assortment plan with downstream execution systems (e.g., Allocation and Replenishment) to ensure the plan translates directly into action.
Unified Data
Model
Merchandising, customer segmentation, and inventory data reside on a single, shared platform, eliminating silos and ensuring all decisions are based on a single source of truth.
AI-Driven
Intelligence
The entire planning process is enhanced by embedded AI/ML for clustering, optimization, and prescriptive recommendations, boosting accuracy beyond human capacity.
Composability & Flexibility
The modular architecture allows the solution to be quickly configured and adapted to your unique store footprint and channel strategies.
Industries
- Retail & Consumer Goods
- Apparel & Footwear
- Speciality & Accessories
Features & Capabilities
PartnerLinQ provides a comprehensive set of features to define, optimize, and manage localized assortments across a multi-channel retail environment.
Smart Clustering & Segmentation: Utilize AI/ML-based store and customer segmentation to automatically or manually cluster locations based on performance, demographics, or sales history for highly localized assortments.
Assortment Optimization: Optimize the product mix (width and depth) by store, channel, or region to maximize local sales potential and service levels.
Product Lifecycle Management: Seamlessly manage the phase-in and phase-out of products within an assortment to ensure smooth transitions between seasons or collections.
Dynamic Refresh: Capabilities for in-season assortment adjustments based on real-time sales performance and evolving consumer demand.
Shared Assortment Workbooks: Enable merchandising, planning, and store operations teams to collaboratively review and finalize assortments within a single, shared workbook.
Assortment Approval Workflows: Orchestrate the approval process for localized assortments, ensuring sign-off from all relevant stakeholders (Merchandising, Finance, and Store Ops).
Transparent Assortment Overrides: Provide visibility into manual adjustments or overrides to the AI-generated assortment, ensuring accountability and traceability.
Localized Performance Metrics: Track key metrics such as Sell-Through % and Return Rate Reduction % at the cluster or store level to evaluate the effectiveness of localized assortments.
Year-over-Year Comparisons: Easily compare the performance of current assortments against prior years (LY, LLY) to identify trends and validate seasonal strategies.
AI-Powered Assortment Recommendations: Receive prescriptive recommendations on product inclusion/exclusion for specific clusters to drive sales and reduce unnecessary inventory transfers.
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
PartnerLinQ's user experience for Assortment Planning is designed to simplify complex clustering and data-intensive optimization, driving planner productivity and strategic focus.
Unified Assortment Canvas: All assortment activities—from cluster definition to final product selection—take place within a single, visual environment.
Clustering: Intuitive tools allow planners to visualize and adjust store clusters or create manual segments with ease.
Generative AI Insights: GenAI provides narrative summaries explaining why a product is recommended or excluded for a specific store cluster (e.g., "Product excluded due to low performance of similar attributes in this cluster's region").
Natural Language Query (NLQ): Use PartnerLinQ.IQ to ask questions such as, "Show me the top 10 best-selling products in the 'Urban High-Traffic' cluster," for instant data retrieval.
Auto-Assortment Generation: The system can automatically generate a baseline assortment based on AI/ML models and configurable business rules, allowing planners to focus only on exceptions and strategic adjustments.
Quick Localization Toggles: Smart actions allow planners to quickly adjust assortments for a cluster or region with a single click (e.g., "Add 5% more depth to the core category in this cluster").
Smart Actions: The system provides actionable recommendations that can be applied with a single click, automating routine decisions and accelerating the planning cycle.
Scenario Planning & Versioning: Quickly create and compare multiple planning scenarios and versions to model the financial impact of different strategies, ensuring you can make fast, confident decisions.
Implementation Advantage
Our agile implementation ensures you achieve rapid success in rolling out localized assortment strategies, avoiding the long, complex deployment cycles of legacy systems.
Agile Business Process Mapping: We utilize prebuilt templates optimized for best-in-class assortment processes, focusing on rapid configuration of your specific store clustering and channel logic.
Streamlined Data Onboarding: Integration capabilities accelerate the ingestion of critical data for clustering, including store attributes, customer demographics, and historical sales performance, ensuring the AI models are trained quickly and effectively.
Configurable Security & Control: Implementation ensures robust, role-based security, governing access to sensitive cluster performance data and assortment finalization workflows.
Expert Guidance & Self-Service: Our consulting team enables your planners to master the AI-driven segmentation tools and sophisticated localization techniques, fostering self-sufficiency in maintaining and evolving your assortment strategies.
End Result & Business Benefit
PartnerLinQ’s Assortment Planning solution delivers measurable results by optimizing the product mix at the point of sale.
Maximized Sell-Through: Achieve higher Sell-Through % by ensuring the product mix in every location is highly relevant to local customer demand.
Reduced Costs: A significant drop in Inventory Transfer Reduction % and Return Rate Reduction % minimizes operational costs associated with moving misplaced inventory and processing returns.
Improved Service Levels: Ensure the right products are in stock where and when customers want them, directly improving customer satisfaction and retention.
Strategic Control: Gain strategic control over the product lifecycle, effectively managing phase-in/phase-out and responding to evolving consumer demand with agility.
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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