Opportunity: We have asked every assortment software vendor the same question over the years: “why can’t we just change our store clusters and see our assortments change at the same time?” No one really understands what the ‘right’ number of clusters is anyway! Recommend the right number of localized assortments for us, not store clusters. Show us different scenarios so we can ‘what-if’ and compare results.

Solution: With AssortEdge, we now simply drag our mouse over the store dendrogram to change store clusters and assortments simultaneously. We see changes to our distribution and financial metrics updated instantly. The best number of localized assortments is now based on our business metrics and goals, not confusing statistics.

Opportunity: Especially with our tier 1 retailers, the assortment optimization process is too time consuming and disconnected. Creating statistical clusters in one piece of software and then assorting in another piece of software is too slow and lacks the precision we need. There must be a more streamlined solution.

Solution: We have rationalized the assortment optimization process into a unified, fast, precise workflow with AssortEdge. We are now generating more detailed and targeted assortments in less than half the time it took us with our legacy systems. AssortEdge has been a force multiplier, allowing our category teams to do more in less time.

Opportunity: We need self-service software tools to get projects done on a moment’s notice in very tight time windows. What would be ideal is if we had the ability to take our current Excel pivot analyses and push a button to see them in the assortment software. Even better, the assortment software should be more visual, able to display all of our stores and items in colored heatmaps which we can quickly customize.

Solution: Working with AssortEdge has been incredibly flexible and fast. We populate our Excel templates with our retailer and market data, and just press a button to create a new project file. We then drag and drop the AssortEdge project file onto our browsers and we’re off and running in minutes. It’s like having a super powerful extension for Excel. And the heatmaps are amazing. I get so many insights from analyzing the colorized performance patterns.