Assortment planning is the process of deciding which products (how many SKUs, at what depth, from which categories) go into which stores, in which channels, for each season or commercial period. It is one of the most consequential decisions in retail — excess creates forced clearance and compromised margin; shortfall creates stockouts and missed opportunity.
The problem is complex because it varies with multiple dimensions: the store's demographic profile (a store in a luxury shopping centre has a different mix from an outlet store), seasonality (winter different from summer), campaigns and events (Black Friday, Christmas, Back-to-School), cluster behaviour (northern vs southern stores, urban centres vs peripheries). Manual assortment planning in a spreadsheet quickly gets out of hand; assortment planning assisted by BI and AI starts to show clear ROI in chains with 20+ stores.
MyBusiness-ITV feeds assortment planning with sales dashboards by store, category, week and SKU, cross-referenced with margin and turnover. For larger chains, predictive models can suggest an optimised mix per store — subject to human review, of course, because commercial planning integrates signals that do not live in the data (fashion trends, brand decisions, category policies).