Inventory planning is a crucial process for retailers, as it determines how much and what kind of products to buy, where to place them, and how to price and promote them. Inventory planning affects not only the profitability and efficiency of the business, but also the customer satisfaction and loyalty.

However, inventory planning is also a complex and challenging task, especially in today's dynamic and competitive retail environment. Retailers face many uncertainties and constraints, such as changing customer preferences, demand fluctuations, supply chain disruptions, inventory availability, pack sizes, distribution capacity, store space, and more.

To overcome these challenges and optimize their inventory planning, retailers need a comprehensive and intelligent solution that can help them:

• Forecast customer demand accurately and efficiently
• Define and optimize their assortment, placement, pricing, promotions, and product lifecycles
• Align their inventory plans with their business objectives and financial goals
• Leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to make better decisions based on data and insights
• Adapt quickly to changing market conditions and customer expectations

Oracle Retail Inventory Planning: A suite of modules for inventory optimization

Oracle Retail Inventory Planning is a suite of modules designed to manage the supply chains of large retailers at the supplier, warehouse, store, and e-commerce levels. The system couples time-phased replenishment and allocation algorithms to produce an actionable receipt plan over time.

Oracle Retail Inventory Planning consists of the following modules:

• Oracle Retail AI Foundation: This module provides the core AI and ML capabilities to support the inventory planning process. It includes features such as forecasting engine, customer segmentation, advanced clustering, profile science, attribute extraction and binning, etc. These features help to provide an intelligent starting point for the planners, increase automation and accuracy, group customers and stores based on similar attributes and behaviors, determine the best size ratio for the buys, extract item attributes from free-form descriptions, and more.
• Oracle Retail Merchandise Financial Planning: This module helps to create top-down and bottom-up financial plans that align with the business objectives and financial goals. It enables the planners to set targets for key performance indicators (KPIs), such as sales, margin, inventory turnover, sell-through, etc., and allocate budgets across different levels of the merchandise hierarchy.
• Oracle Retail Assortment Planning: This module helps to define and optimize the assortment of products that meet the customer demand and preferences. It enables the planners to create customer decision trees that reflect how customers shop for products based on their attributes, such as color, style, size, etc. It also allows the planners to create localized assortments for different store clusters based on their sales patterns.
• Oracle Retail Category Management: This module helps to plan and execute category strategies that optimize the performance of each product category. It enables the planners to analyze category performance based on various metrics, such as sales, margin, market share, customer satisfaction, etc., and identify opportunities for improvement. It also allows the planners to create category plans that include objectives, tactics, roles, responsibilities, timelines, etc., and monitor their execution.
• Oracle Retail Assortment and Space Optimization: This module helps to optimize the allocation of space and inventory across different store formats and locations. It enables the planners to create planograms that show how products are arranged on shelves or racks based on their sales potential, profitability, visual appeal, etc. It also allows the planners to optimize the inventory flow from warehouses to stores based on demand forecasts, store capacity, pack sizes, etc.
• Oracle Retail Data Store: This module provides a centralized data repository that integrates data from various sources, such as point-of-sale systems.