In this video, we will show how Board helps retailers turn merchandise financial

planning into a connected, strategic, and actionable planning flow.

Planning teams face similar challenges.

Finance sets top-down targets or financial budgets.

Merchants build category strategies.

Planners work through the details, and execution teams need actionable plans

for downstream processes. Too often, these activities happen in

disconnected spreadsheets, with teams manually reconciling numbers and

hoping nothing breaks along the way. Let's see how we fix that in Board.

First off, in Board, you will experience an actionable process through unified

merchandise planning, connecting financial targets, category

strategies, and plans into a single planning flow.

This creates a single source of truth.

Secondly, we will discuss how Board empowers intelligent, scenario-driven

decisions. Users have access to historical analysis,

external signals, and scenario planning at their fingertips.

This allows teams to make strategic decisions with confidence, model risks

and opportunities, and incorporate these insights into decision-making.

Lastly, we will also cover how to turn strategy into execution,

ensuring all plans are actionable across channels, categories, and

products, and are published downstream into related execution workflows.

In this example, we see a dashboard displaying Board's view of retail planning from

start to finish. This includes the merchandise strategic plan, open to

buy, channel planning, range and assortment, allocation,

replenishment, and scenario planning.

Today, we will focus on merchandise financial planning.

Instead of starting each planning cycle from scratch, Board enables users to

seed the new plan for the season or year with the most suitable methodology.

This could be based on last year's sales performance, the top-down financial

budget, or any approved plan already in the solution, so users do not

have to start from scratch. This approach immediately provides users with a

governed starting point. They can compare the working plan to the financial budget

and last year's results. They can also see how the initial working plan and

the category plan compare to current and previous data in the solution.

Board uses exception-based alerts to guide users on where to focus,

helping them understand business performance and lessons learned.

From this point, planners can work directly in the planning grid below.

This is where we can review and adjust key metrics and performance indicators such

as sales dollars, sales units, cost, and margin, and

understand how all of these compare to the top-line budget.

What we see in this grid is a merchandise strategy for our activewear offering,

focusing on growth, core, and decline.

We can identify what's growing, what's in decline, and plan our business

accordingly from that perspective.

As planners, we may be responsible for specific categories.

Board gives both users and planners the flexibility to plan in ways that are

most meaningful and relevant for their roles.

So rather than just looking at department and strategy, we might focus

on category and subcategory, especially if we are only concerned with

tops. While planning our tops, we want to dynamically understand

the impact of any changes we make. For example, we want to see

what happens to our sales units if we adjust sales dollars.

If we increase sales dollars by a million, keeping it at 10.2 because

we like the overall tops number but believe sweatshirts will perform

better, we can immediately see that our units have increased, costs have

changed, and so has our margin. What this provides is immediate

visibility for planners into the trade-offs behind each decision.

We're not just changing numbers. We can see the financial impact of those decisions

as we make them. It's important that everyone is still working from the same

connected plan, even if they are viewing it through the lens that best fits their

role. Another key capability within Board is scenario planning.

Instead of relying on a single static version of the plan, we can

incorporate different scenarios into our planning process.

This allows us to model outcomes based on various factors, such as shifts in

demand. If we encounter a challenge with lead time, availability,

or a budget constraint, we can make adjustments to those scenarios and model them

against our working plan, as well as the most recently published plan.

This allows us to evaluate risks and opportunities.

We can use these insights to seed our plan, helping us understand and

adjust our plan according to the risks and opportunities we consider valid as

conditions continue to change. Once teams are aligned on this

merchandise financial plan, it can be immediately published downstream.

This action locks in the approved working merchandise financial plan and makes it

available to connected execution processes, including, in this

case, open to buy and other downstream workflows.

We have discussed moving from the financial budget and targets to utilizing a

merchandise strategy to plan at a more granular level.

We do this by configuring views that align with the planning process for each

planning group and by using scenario planning to model different outcomes

and evaluate risks and opportunities.

Finally, we publish those approved plans directly into open to buy and

other downstream execution workflows.

This is the value of merchandise financial planning and Board connected

planning. Faster alignment, better decisions, and a clear path

from strategy to execution.