A vital tool that needed updating

We’re really excited to have launched our brand new WSSI (Weekly Sales, Stock and Intake) as a standardised planning solution for retailers of all shapes and sizes. But why did we choose a WSSI as our first ‘off-the-shelf’ product launch?

With such a long history, many retailers are now questioning whether a WSSI can still meet their needs in the 21^st century, but at Plan IT Retail we believe it’s still fundamentally the right tool for the job – it just needed a lot of modernising! The longevity and ubiquity of WSSIs in the retail industry underlines their importance, and we recognise the value in sharing best practice across the sector. By leveraging new technologies to improve performance and overcome common pain points, our powerful new tool brings WSSI up to date and cements its relevance as a planning tool for the next generation of retailers.

In-built forecasting engine

Our objective from the outset was to give businesses and their users the information they need to make the important decisions. We let our forecasting engine do the heavy lifting, which facilitates an exception-based approach to user inputs, giving merchandisers the time to focus their efforts where they can have the biggest impact.

Powerful performance

Performance is a big challenge with any data-driven software implementation. We’re extremely proud that we’ve created an innovative solution capable of disaggregating user inputs across thousands of data points and recalculating dependent fields in a fraction of a second, allowing users to quickly model different scenarios without the need to create multiple versions of their WSSI.

Full visibility

By including top-down and bottom-up forecasting in the same tool, we’re ensuring that the WSSI meets the needs of all business users: giving full visibility of all buying and merchandising teams’ up-to-date forecasts with the bottom-up view, and maintaining a more stable strategic view to report against at a high level with the top-down view. With both versions available in the same place, we aim to improve transparency and guide better decision making at all levels.

Visit the WSSI product page to explore more of the key features.

‍

The challenges

Most retailers’ existing WSSI solutions fall into one of two categories: legacy systems or manual workarounds. Both have their drawbacks which contribute to the perception of WSSI as an outdated solution, and both necessitate subtly different change management approaches to successfully embed a new solution.

Legacy systems

You’ve probably encountered some of these if you’ve worked for any large, established retailer. Many of these were implemented in the 1990s and haven’t changed much since!

Limitations of legacy WSSI systems include:

• Poor integration with Business Intelligence tools forcing a rigid weekly cadence of submission and review.
• Lack of forecast disaggregation across product hierarchies and time, making updating forecasts manually an industry in itself.
• Limited multichannel forecasting capability taking ownership away from multichannel teams.
• Missing KPIs requiring supplementary documents to see the full picture.
• Rigid hierarchical forecasts and inflexible roll-ups inhibiting cross-category working.

All of these limitations have led to the role of the WSSI in many businesses shifting from that of a vital working tool for merchandisers and buyers, to a tick-box weekly task for assistant merchandisers to complete. With an over-emphasis on reconciling the actuals and balancing forward forecasts back to agreed budgets, the WSSI is often more of a mathematical exercise than a forecasting tool. This results in risks being hidden and opportunities being missed, and a lack of confidence in decisions made.

Change management considerations when implementing a new solution to replace legacy systems include:

• Overcoming users’ negative perceptions of WSSIs in general, often built up over years of using the legacy tools.
• Shifting the focus away from rigid submission schedules to treat the WSSI as a powerful tool for guiding decision-making.
• Removing the fear that sometimes prevents honest, realistic forecasts from being surfaced in centralised WSSIs.
• Aligning processes and accountability structures to empower multichannel teams to own their forecasts.

Manual workarounds

Spreadsheet-based manual WSSIs are a mainstay of smaller and newer businesses where they are usually the only tool available, but decentralised spreadsheets are also very common in larger businesses. Here they sit alongside centralised legacy systems, giving buying and merchandising teams an unofficial - but often more realistic - view of their forecasts. These hidden forecasts are a direct result of the rigid submission timelines and obsession with balancing back to plans that those legacy systems encourage.

In one extreme example, we encountered 94 different versions of Excel-based workarounds being used in the same company!

Often built internally by the resident spreadsheet wizard, some of these solutions are pretty impressive, but they still suffer from the same limitations as legacy systems, plus a few more:

• Non-existent integration makes even updating actuals a very manual task, increasing opportunities for errors.
• Unstable files on shared drives are prone to frequent corruptions and crashes, and limited collaboration capabilities.
• A reliance on Excel limits functionality to one-way aggregation or disaggregation of forecasts.
• Ways of working are often wildly inconsistent across teams in a larger organisation.
• The absence of a centralised view of ‘real’ forecasts results in missed opportunities and unmitigated risks. By the time these risks and opportunities are visible to decision-makers, it’s often too late to act.

In the absence of an existing legacy tool the change management journey for a WSSI implementation looks quite different. Left to figure out a problem for themselves, savvy business users create solutions that work for them, and can be reluctant to switch to a tool that better meets the needs of the business as a whole. The specific challenges include:

• Aligning on consistent processes across all merchandising functions.
• Meeting the core business needs without bending the solution to replicate all existing ways of working.
• Persuading users that the new tool is able to replace their manual spreadsheets, rather than creating another task to complete.

Whatever the existing solutions in an organisation look like, we recognise that it’s vital to put user experience front and centre when designing new tools, even when a client’s justification for a project is more focused on the wider business goals. Without buy-in from the user base and a clear demonstration of how the new solution will make their jobs easier, any new software implementation is doomed to fail.

Register now for free, instant access to our online demo with no obligation to receive follow-up contact from us.