The Planning Fundamentals You Need

When you’re building a brand, you’re determining what you sell and which vendors you can partner with based on financing or cash. You sell what you buy.

But once you have a portfolio of products and a suite of factory and material partners, you’re going to face challenges to continue growing sustainably without proper planning fundamentals.

For example…

• You’ll run out of key marketing styles in the middle of the season
• You’ll start facing delivery delays and gaps in your in-stock levels
• You’ll face margin degradation from having to liquidate product that doesn’t sell
• You’ll face inventory growth, like the Apparel & Footwear Brands currently showing 60-85% increased inventories over LY

These are challenges that Zefyr Consulting is uniquely positioned to solve.

We’ve worked with brands and factory partners both large and small to build Planning, Inventory, and Sales and Operations processes that give you the foundation for sustainable growth.

What foundational elements do you need to have built for your brand or factory?

• Demand Planning: As you grow, your sales and merchandising teams are no longer sufficient to create seasonal and multi-season demand plans for your SKUs. A clear demand planning process aligns real data and trends with the aspirational assortment choices of your buying team.
• Supply Planning: Forecasting inventory and production needs - in partnership with the timelines of your key partners - is the key to sufficient capacity at the right price. 
• Source Planning: It’s not just about style-level sales with your consumer or customer. Planning with the right horizons and level of detail aligns your entire supply chain with all of your key vendors.
• Training and Organizational Design: It’s time to end bloated - or bottlenecked - planning processes. Train your team on planning best practices and design decision rights and escalation protocols to align the decisions at the right level of the organization.

And it’s not just process guidelines. Zefyr Consulting has deep expertise in:

• Inventory and Safety Stock Analysis
• SKU-level assortment planning
• Open to Buy and Demand Planning Analysis
• Long-Range Planning and Source Base Alignment
• Organizational Design and KPI design
• Master Data Best Practices
• Go-To-Market Calendar and Workflow Process Design
• Key Gate Agendas and Decision-Making Templates

Planning and S&OP fundamentals too often get pushed for too long, until you’re seeing the strain in your results. Teams need to be trained and empowered to make quick decisions in a choppy market.

Are you ready to build the fundamentals for your next stage of growth? 

Does your organization have these foundational capabilities? Contact us today to get started on assessing your capabilities in this area.