Notes on planning, buying and the data underneath.
Mostly things that go wrong in planning processes and why — written for merchants and planners rather than for other consultants.
Your merch plan will never tie to your SKU plan
Tops-down sets the guardrails. Bottoms-up fills them in. Asking the two to reconcile at SKU level is a guaranteed waste of everyone's time — and if leadership is demanding it, the real work is educating them on what an OTB actually is.
Read the article → Planning"Why doesn't your forecast match the plan?" is the wrong question
In open-to-buy meetings a plan-versus-forecast delta gets treated like somebody screwed up. It's backwards. The gap is the job — it's the only thing in the room showing you where risk and upside actually live.
Read the article → Systems & dataAI makes Excel faster. It doesn't make Excel governed.
AI in Excel writes formulas and cleans data fast, and that's real time back. It doesn't fix the disease: the numbers came from a copy-paste that was stale on arrival, and every planner's file disagrees with every other one.
Read the article → PlanningYour best seller sold out in week 6. What did it cost you?
Sales history records what you sold, which is a number capped by what you had. Plan forward from it and you inherit last year's stockouts as this year's forecast. Here's how to measure the gap instead of guessing at it.
Read the article →Recognize the problem?
If any of this sounds like your season, it's worth half an hour.