SOLUTIONS
Seasonal Line Planning
Forecast demand for new products and collections
PartnerLinQ’s Seasonal Line Planning solution transforms the high-stakes risk of new product introductions (NPIs) into a predictable, data-driven process. We eliminate the guesswork associated with new products by providing a unified platform for generating highly accurate forecasts for styles, collections, and seasonal lines.
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:
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
- Apparel & Footwear
- Speciality & Accessories
Features & Capabilities
PartnerLinQ provides a robust set of features engineered to master the complexity and volatility inherent in seasonal and new product planning.
Historical Analog Matching: Automatically or manually match new products to the performance of similar historical items using attribute-based logic (e.g., color, material, style).
Attribute-Based Adjustments: Refine forecasts dynamically by specific attributes, allowing planners to adjust demand for factors like a trending color or new material.
Multi-Season Performance Comparison: Easily compare a new line's projected performance against prior seasons (LY, LLY) to understand year-over-year growth and strategy changes.
External Factor Integration: Incorporate the impact of promotions, marketing campaigns, weather, and external trends to enrich and refine the final forecast.
Unified Line Review Workbooks: Enable collaborative forecasting with inputs from Merchandising, Sales, and Finance, ensuring consensus on the final demand projection for NPIs.
Transparent Adjustments: Support role-based overrides and real-time visibility into who made what adjustment and why, ensuring full accountability for NPI projections.
Workflow Orchestration: Manage the end-to-end NPI introduction process, from initial forecast generation to final buyer sign-off, within a single, governed workflow.
NPI-Specific Metric Tracking: Monitor performance using critical metrics like NPI Forecast Accuracy %, Sell-through % for New Products, and Forecast Bias % (NPI vs baseline).
Scenario Planning: Run "what-if" scenarios to test the financial and inventory impact of different attribute mixes, launch dates, or promotional strategies for the new line.
AI-Powered Recommendations: Receive prescriptive recommendations on which historical analogs to use and which attribute adjustments are most likely to increase forecast accuracy.
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 is designed to drive rapid adoption, increase productivity, and empower Merchandising teams with the insights they need to make confident decisions on new lines.
Unified Planning Experience: All activities—from NPI forecasting and attribute management to seasonal recaps—take place within a single environment, eliminating the need to compile data from separate tools.
Interactive Line Grids: Highly configurable grids allow planners to personalize views, making it easy to see projections by attribute, compare them to past seasons, and make dynamic adjustments.
Generative AI Insights: Our generative AI provides narrative summaries explaining how an NPI forecast was generated (e.g., "Forecast based on the performance of 'Fall Jacket 2024' due to 85% attribute match"), fostering trust in the NPI projection.
Natural Language Query (NLQ): Use PartnerLinQ.IQ to ask questions such as, "What is the projected sell-through for the new collection's blue styles?" to get instant, data-driven answers.
Autonomous NPI Forecasting: The platform can auto-generate baseline forecasts using the best analog match, freeing up planners to focus on high-value strategic adjustments.
Quick Replication: Easily copy master plans for faster iterations, allowing planners to test multiple attribute or pricing strategies quickly.
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
PartnerLinQ enables agile and rapid implementation, allowing your team to start planning new seasonal lines with speed and high confidence.
Agile Business Process Mapping: We utilize standard templates tailored for the fashion and specialty retail industries, focusing on rapid configuration of your specific product attributes and seasonal calendars.
Streamlined Data Onboarding: Our prebuilt adapters accelerate the ingestion of complex product attribute data (e.g., style, color, material) and historical sales performance, which is crucial for the analog matching engine.
Configurable Security & Control: Robust, role-based security ensures sensitive NPI and financial projection data is governed, limiting access to those responsible for pre-season investment decisions.
Expert Guidance & Self-Service: Our consulting team provides comprehensive enablement focused on training your planners to manage the AI-driven attribute matching and manual adjustments, building self-service mastery over your NPI forecasting process.
End Result & Business Benefit
PartnerLinQ’s agile implementation process leads directly to rapid value realization and tangible business benefits for your new product pipeline:
Higher NPI Success Rate: Achieve significantly higher NPI Forecast Accuracy %, ensuring new products launch with the right initial inventory levels.
Maximized Early Sell-Through: By accurately aligning buy quantities to demand, you maximize sell-through in the crucial first 4-8 weeks, reducing the need for early markdowns.
Minimized Risk & Waste: Directly reduces inventory-related risk by minimizing both overbuying (excess inventory) and under-stocking (lost sales) for seasonal items.
Faster Merchandising Cycles: Streamlines the line review and final sign-off process through unified collaboration and AI-driven insights, accelerating time-to-market for your most innovative products.
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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