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Retail Buy Planning

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Streamline purchase decisions from plans to POs

PartnerLinQ's Buy Planning solution is the critical link that translates strategic merchandise and financial plans into actionable, compliant purchase decisions. We streamline the process from finalized plans to Purchase Order (PO) generation, ensuring every buy is accurate, timely, and aligned with financial controls.

PartnerLinQ provides complete ecosystem that delivers on this vision through four core pillars:

End-to-End
Connectivity

Seamlessly link finalized buy quantities to the PO generation process and outward to vendor management systems.

Unified Data

Model

Assortment plans, OTB limits, vendor contracts, and buy quantities reside on a single, shared platform, eliminating purchasing errors caused by data fragmentation.

AI-Driven
Intelligence

Leverage AI insights to optimize buy quantities against forecast accuracy and vendor performance metrics.

Composability & Flexibility

The modular architecture supports rapid configuration of complex PO rules and vendor assignment logic based on category needs.

Industries

Retail & Consumer Goods
Apparel & Footwear
Speciality & Accessories

Features & Capabilities

PartnerLinQ provides a comprehensive set of features to streamline the buy process, maximize vendor utilization, and ensure agility throughout the season.

Final Buy Quantity Determination: Tools to finalize buy quantities, reconciling planned demand with OTB limits and inventory targets.
Vendor Assignment & Ranking: Capabilities to assign vendors based on performance metrics (e.g., Vendor Fill Rate %), contract terms, and lead times.
Automated PO Generation: Generate Purchase Orders directly from the finalized buy plan, ensuring high PO Accuracy % and reducing manual errors.
Rebuy/Chase Capabilities: Tools to quickly identify opportunities for in-season rebuys or chase orders, maximizing the Rebuy/Chase Success Rate %.

Shared Procurement Workbooks: Provide a single environment for Planners to communicate buy needs and for Procurement to manage vendor execution.

Contract & Visibility: Seamless access to vendor contracts and performance history during the buy finalization process.

PO Approval Workflows: Governed workflows for cross-functional approvals of high-value POs, ensuring financial and merchandising alignment.

Vendor Performance Monitoring: Continuous tracking of key vendor metrics, including Vendor Fill Rate % and on-time delivery.
Buy Accuracy Analysis: Monitor Buy Quantity Accuracy % against final sales and forecast performance to improve future purchasing decisions.
In-Season Agility Tracking: Analyze the Rebuy/Chase Success Rate % to quantify the solution’s impact on quick inventory adjustments.

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 Buy Planning user experience is designed for procurement speed, data accuracy, and vendor performance transparency.

Unified Buy Decision Interface: A single screen where Buyers can view finalized buy quantities, available OTB, and vendor assignment options simultaneously.
Vendor Performance Dashboards: Interactive visualizations provide instant insights into a vendor's reliability and historical performance, informing strategic assignment decisions.

Generative AI Insights: GenAI provides narrative summaries explaining any discrepancies between the planned quantity and the final buy quantity (e.g., "Buy quantity adjusted down by 5% to comply with current OTB limit").
Natural Language Query (NLQ): Use PartnerLinQ.IQ to quickly ask, "What is the average Vendor Fill Rate for the top five suppliers in the Accessories category?"

Autonomous PO Drafting: The system automatically drafts compliant POs based on the finalized buy quantities, minimizing manual data entry and speeding up the process.
Smart Vendor Recommendations: Prescriptive recommendations suggest the optimal vendor for an order based on current contract terms, lead time, and required delivery date.

Implementation Advantage

Our agile implementation focuses on rapidly integrating financial controls and vendor management data to accelerate the plan-to-procurement cycle.

Agile Business Process Mapping: We utilize prebuilt templates optimized for best-in-class PO generation and vendor assignment workflows, ensuring rapid configuration of your procurement rules.
Streamlined Data Onboarding: Integration capabilities accelerate the ingestion of critical data, including finalized assortment plans, OTB limits, and vendor contract terms/performance history, ensuring the Buy Planning module is functional quickly.
Configurable Security & Control: Implementation ensures tight, role-based governance over PO creation and final approval thresholds, maintaining financial and audit compliance.
Expert Guidance & Self-Service: Our consulting team provides comprehensive enablement focused on training your teams to manage vendor ranking, execute in-season rebuy/chase orders, and utilize the automated PO generation tools.

End Result & Business Benefit

PartnerLinQ’s Buy Planning solution delivers efficiency, financial control, and superior execution, maximizing the return on your inventory investment.

Maximized Vendor Performance: Achieve a higher Vendor Fill Rate % and improved inventory flow by strategically assigning orders to reliable, high-performing suppliers.

Reduced Purchasing Errors: A significant reduction in manual errors and discrepancies, ensuring a high PO Accuracy % and reducing costly disputes.

Optimized Inventory Investment: Ensure your purchasing aligns perfectly with demand, leading to a high Buy Quantity Accuracy % and better inventory utilization.

In-Season Competitiveness: The ability to execute fast rebuy/chase orders, quantifiable through Rebuy/Chase Success Rate %, allows you to quickly react to market trends and capture lost sales.

Pricing Model

PartnerLinQ provides 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.

Retail Buy Planning