SOLUTIONS
Wholesale Assortment Planning
Builds channel and key-account specific buy plans
PartnerLinQ's Wholesale Assortment Planning ensures brands deliver the right product mix for each retailer, distributor, or marketplace, striking the critical balance between sales potential and profitability. We move beyond one-size-fits-all strategies, enabling brands to use granular clustering and customer segmentation to tailor assortments that optimize performance across diverse B2B channels.
PartnerLinQ provides complete ecosystem that delivers on this vision through four core capability pillars:
End-to-End
Connectivity
Seamlessly link SKU-level forecast targets and customer segmentation rules to downstream order fulfillment and material planning.
Unified Data
Model
Assortment logic, customer segment data, and historical performance reside on a single platform, eliminating the "siloed financial vs operational planning" challenge.
AI-Driven
Intelligence
Leverage ML for clustering and customer segmentation and dynamic margin calculation to ensure profitable assortment allocation.
Composability & Flexibility
The modular architecture allows the solution to be easily configured to define customer hierarchies and localized assortment preferences, reflecting complex wholesale structures.
Features & Capabilities
PartnerLinQ provides the segmentation, logic, and lifecycle management required to build profitable, customer-specific product mixes for the complex wholesale environment.
AI Clustering & Segmentation: Uses advanced tools for clustering and customer segmentation to categorize partners based on performance, consumer profile, or strategic importance.
Tailored Assortment Logic: Apply specific rules—for example, allocating a higher percentage of fashion SKUs to flagship retailers versus a higher percentage of core/replenishment SKUs to volume distributors.
Auto-Generation Tools: Provides planners with the tools to auto-generate assortments using historical performance data, forecast inputs, or defined rule-based logic for efficiency.
Phase-in/Phase-out Control: Clearly manages phase-in/phase-out cycles for seasonal collections and continuous product lines within each customer's assortment plan.
Returns Planning: Integrates and models return planning expectations directly into the assortment mix and inventory requirements, targeting a lower Return Rate %.
Localized Preferences: Ability to incorporate and manage localized assortment preferences and exclusions dictated by regional distributors or marketplaces.
Historical Comparison: Easily perform Year-over-Year Comparisons (LY, LLY) of assortment performance to validate mix effectiveness and inform future planning.
KPI Tracking: Monitor success metrics like Sell-in Forecast Accuracy % and Actual vs Projected Units/Sales at the account level.
Profitability Analysis: Track Customer Margin Contribution % to ensure assortment decisions drive the highest profitability across the entire partner portfolio.
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
Wholesale Assortment Planning provides a highly visual and intuitive environment that empowers planners to manage hundreds of customer-specific assortments simultaneously.
Assortment Boards: Provides intuitive tools for building, reviewing, and presenting assortments tailored for each customer or channel.
Rule-Based Logic Toggles: Planners can easily apply rule-based logic (e.g., "Must include X% of core SKUs") and instantly see the impact on the final product mix and financial targets.
Scenario Modeling: Allows planners to test the impact of adding or removing product groups (e.g., a "digital-first collection") on the projected Customer Margin Contribution % before finalizing the plan.
AI-Driven Recommendation: The system provides intelligent recommendations for assortments based on historical sell-through performance within similar customer segments (clustering).
Exception Alerting: Automatically highlights proposed assortments that contain an unusually high percentage of products from high-return categories or violate an account's contracted terms.
Implementation Advantage
Our implementation focuses on integrating historical customer data and performance metrics to enable segmentation and tailored assortment building from day one.
Rapid Segmentation Setup: Expedited configuration of clustering and customer segmentation rules based on historical purchase data and account profitability.
Data Integration for Analytics: Seamlessly connects sales history (Actual vs Projected Units/Sales) and returns data (Return Rate %) from ERP/OMS systems to power assortment optimization.
Wholesale Rule Customization: Quick configuration of business logic for allocating product groups based on channel type (e.g., premium SKUs for flagship retailers vs. core SKUs for volume distributors).
User Training on Logic: Comprehensive training to enable merchandising and sales teams to effectively use the auto-generate assortments feature and the underlying rule-based logic.
End Result & Business Benefit
PartnerLinQ’s Wholesale Assortment Planning solution is the key to maximizing revenue from existing partnerships while actively controlling inventory risk.
Improved Profitability: Increases the overall Customer Margin Contribution % by ensuring high-margin products are distributed to the most suitable accounts.
Reduced Cost: Drastically lowers inventory risk and associated costs by minimizing the Return Rate % through data-driven, appropriate assortment selection.
Higher Sales Reliability: Achieves a superior Sell-in Forecast Accuracy % because forecasts are based on a committed, tailored assortment, leading to stable B2B ordering.
Stronger Partnerships: The ability to provide tailored, localized plans strengthens relationships with key partners, promoting higher sell-through performance and repeat business.
Pricing Model
PartnerLinQ provides overall business value and industry-specific intelligent planning technology and solutions for both current and future needs. We offer a simplified 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 usage 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 applications, 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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