Enterprise Planning for retail

Turn consumer spending patterns into smarter merchandise, assortment, and replenishment plans—aligning product strategy to customers’ needs. Increase profitability and accelerate digital transformation with the Board Enterprise Planning Platform.

Talk to an expert Watch a demo

Merchandiser Agent: AI built for unified merchandising planning

Help retail merchandising teams make faster, more complete decisions by bringing Merchandise Financial Planning (MFP), Open-to-Buy (OTB), allocation, replenishment, inventory, and margin together in one unified planning environment.

One unified planning environment from plan to trade AI grounded in unified merchandising planning.

The Board Merchandiser Agent helps retail merchandising teams analyze category performance, understand planning accuracy, identify inventory and Open-to-Buy (OTB) risks, and evaluate margin impact before decisions become costly.

Built inside Board’s unified merchandising planning environment, the agent brings together Merchandise Financial Planning (MFP), OTB, inventory, allocation and replenishment signals, margin, and commercial targets in one integrated planning context.

Rather than acting as a standalone AI assistant, the Board Merchandiser Agent supports planners where merchandising decisions already happen, helping teams explain root causes, evaluate trade-offs, and move from insight to recommended next actions with confidence.

The result is faster, more complete merchandising decisions powered by AI and grounded in integrated planning data.

Built for merchandising use cases that matter.

Open-to-Buy (OTB) Agent

Identifies Open-to-Buy (OTB) exposure, coverage gaps, inventory risk, and root causes across products, channels, and regions to support earlier corrective action.

Merchandise Financial Planning (MFP) Agent

Analyzes category performance, reviews plan accuracy, and identifies where sales, margin, markdown, or pricing assumptions need attention before new merchandising commitments are made.

Allocation & Replenishment (A&R) Agent

Detects stock imbalance, , replenishment exceptions, and inventory risk, then recommends prioritized allocation and replenishment actions to protect availability and improve sell-through.

Explore Board Merchandiser Agent

The key to driving retail performance.

Unify retail planning

Break through the limits of static and siloed planning processes. Deploy a unified model to make data-driven merchandising, assortment, and inventory decisions.

Take a consumer-centric approach

Turn consumer behaviors into strategic insights. Optimize your assortment strategy—aligning product requirements with customers’ needs market-by-market.

Increase efficiency across all channels

Tackle omnichannel challenges by aligning merchandise financial planning with supply chain. Leverage external demand signals to improve forecasts.

Drive profitability

Optimize merchandising strategies across channels and formats—maximizing profits while maintaining flexibility in an evolving market.

Maximize responsiveness

Plan and identify the most effective distribution of inventory. Maximize availability, revenue, and customer satisfaction.

Ensure flexibility

Improve inventory flexibility and achieve perfect control over pre-season and in-season allocations while ensuring profitability and high customer service.

Planning is one of the most difficult capabilities to land successfully. When we were looking for a solution provider, it was clear that Board would be right for us because of its flexibility, and our teams instantly became comfortable with the user interface they would be working with.

Read the case study

Retail planning solutions that accelerate profitability and growth.

MERCHANDISE FINANCIAL PLANNING

Master merchandising with efficiency and accuracy.

Make smart, customer-centric decisions and optimize product mix, profitability, and operations with Board Merchandise Financial Planning.

Explore the solution

ASSORTMENT PLANNING

Dynamically align assortment plans to your customers.

Optimize assortments with precision and agility and align your merchandising to meet evolving customer needs.

Explore the solution

ALLOCATION AND REPLENISHMENT

Take control with intelligent allocation and replenishment.

Boost your bottom line with every stock decision. The Board allocation and replenishment solution empowers you to hit sales, inventory, and markdown goals every season, every time.

Explore the solution

RETAIL DEMAND PLANNING

Ace inventory decisions.

Optimize inventory, react to trends, and maximize profitability with data-led precision.

Explore the solution

OPEN-TO-BUY/WSSI

Make every season a success.

Break free from guesswork and achieve more with the Board OTB solution.

Explore the solution

INDUSTRY INSIGHT

Tariffs May Hurt – But Static Planning Will Break Your Margins

Why Fashion Retailers Need Dynamic Cost Visibility

Read the blog

Don’t just take our word for it.

Read this Gartner® Market Guide for Retail Assortment Management Applications to learn about vendors that support digital business transformation.

Get the report

Built for a continuous planning experience.

All our planning solutions converge on the Board Enterprise Planning Platform to help you make confident, aligned decisions. They transform your planning process by accelerating time to value, driving cost effectiveness, and reducing risk.

Explore the platform

FAQs

Board’s retail planning solutions replicate a retailer’s full operating model – customer, inventory, revenue, and SG&A – within one connected platform. They provide governance and control at the strategic and financial level while maximising agility across merchandising and supply-chain planning. With a single version of truth, teams collaborate on shared targets, adapt faster to change, and turn every decision – from strategy to shelf – into measurable, confident performance.

Board enables retailers to plan and trade with precision across stores, regions, and channels. Continuous assortment sensing and AI-driven clustering adapt plans in real time to customer behaviour and market shifts. By connecting customer signals with financial and merchandising data, Board allows teams to localize assortments, optimise depth and breadth, and protect margin – ensuring every product decision aligns to true demand and drives growth.

AI in Board is embedded throughout every planning layer – from forecasting to allocation to scenario modelling. Machine-learning engines analyse internal and external signals to predict demand, pricing, and stock risk. Planners can test scenarios instantly and act on explainable insights. This blend of automation and visibility improves forecast accuracy by up to 15 %, accelerates in-season response, and enables confident, data-driven decisions that balance creativity and profit.

Board connects seamlessly with ERP, PLM, POS, CRM, and data-lake systems through open APIs and pre-built connectors, creating a single version of truth without heavy IT lift. This interoperability preserves existing investments while enabling a unified data model. Retailers gain collaboration across finance, merchandising, and supply chain, faster deployments, and scalable architecture – modernising at their own pace while evolving a connected, governed planning ecosystem.

Board combines enterprise-grade configurability with intuitive design. Retailers can tailor models, workflows, and views to fit existing processes – without coding or third-party integrators. A modern, Excel-like interface speeds adoption for business users while ensuring governance for IT. The result is flexibility without complexity: planners work faster, teams collaborate easily, and the platform evolves with the business to support continuous planning and innovation.

Board delivers impact within months: up to 30 % markdown reduction, 8-12 % lower inventory holding costs, and 10-15 % improvement in forecast accuracy. Unified visibility enables better open-to-buy control, higher full-price sell-through, and faster in-season re-planning. By connecting strategic, financial, and operational plans, Board gives retailers confidence in every decision – turning alignment and agility into measurable margin, efficiency, and growth.

Retail planning requires forward-looking capabilities that go beyond the descriptive insights provided by BI tools. While BI platforms help retailers analyze historical sales and performance, retail planning solutions like Board enable demand forecasting, assortment planning, and scenario simulation. This allows retailers to optimize inventory, pricing, and promotions based on future demand. By integrating planning and analytics in one platform, retailers can respond faster to market changes and improve profitability across channels.

Board minimizes hallucinations by grounding AI directly in your enterprise planning data and business logic. Unlike generic AI tools that generate responses from broad training data or documents, Board’s AI agents operate on your governed data model—using your metrics, hierarchies, and calculations as the source of truth. This ensures that outputs are based on real data, not assumptions.

In addition, Board uses domain-specific, role-based agents embedded within planning workflows. These agents are designed for specific tasks—such as variance analysis or financial modeling—so they operate within clear boundaries rather than producing open-ended responses.

The result is AI that delivers traceable, explainable, and audit-ready insights, helping teams trust the outputs and act on them with confidence.

Board applies the same enterprise-grade security model used across its platform to all AI capabilities. AI agents inherit existing role-based access controls, meaning they can only access the data, models, and actions that a user is authorized to see or perform. If a user doesn’t have permission, neither does the agent.

Beyond data access, Board enforces policy-driven guardrails that define what actions agents can take, which workflows they can operate in, and when human approval is required. This ensures AI operates safely within business-defined boundaries.

All agent activity is fully auditable, providing visibility into how decisions are made and ensuring compliance with internal controls and regulatory requirements.

Together, this approach delivers AI that is not only powerful, but secure, governed, and enterprise-ready by design.