My former life in operational roles was driven by the retail planning calendar. There was a rhythm to the year, the quarter, the month, the week that underpinned everything: Company strategy sharing, Team strategy development, Trips (Inspiration, Market, Sourcing, Booking), Sign Offs, WSSI roll-ups, and Monday morning meetings.
There was a core set of activities in each time period that were lead-time driven and were the priority. Whilst retailers always strive to reduce lead-times and source carefully to balance lead-times and costs, they are a fixed reality of each business model each season.
Whether you are wholesale, concession, franchise or direct to market you have to buy product in time to sell it.
To get the most out of all the skills in the different functions of the business it is vital that each understands what they need to contribute at what stage of the retail planning calendar. Only then will that valuable input be reflected in the strategy, plans, volume and product.
Barriers to Retail Planning Calendar success
In essence what goes wrong is that functions focus on their own tasks, their own needs, their own timelines.
The focus for each function is often on their specialty, quite rightly, but the whole needs to align to make the most of each set of skills.
Hopefully all will have fed into the company strategy which in turn directs the B&M teams, the department-level strategy work to base a plan on, the range building that needs to take place to ensure the offer is balanced and hits the KPIs… etc.
So, for example, if Marketing need decisions on product “X” weeks before launch in order to source and print window graphics, then to them the lead-time is “X” weeks.
Silo working, only understanding our own element, is a key barrier to an effective retail planning calendar. We need the experts in each area to work as a team in order to deliver for the customer.
Defining the Retail Planning Calendar
Once we have The Retail Cycle expanded out to an agreed High-Level Operating Model which identifies the tasks, the sequence and the functional task owner, then we start to define the when – the Commercial Planning Calendar.
Starting with when you need the stock to be available in store/online/for a partner, you work back through how long it takes in your network to be available. I.e., how long it takes to transport from supplier, how long it takes to make, how long it takes to source the raw materials, to establish the booking date – this is what is included in the lead-time.
We then look at the other end of the calendar and agree when each element of the Operating Model can be actioned.
When will you know enough information about your current half/year/season to be able to start work on your plan year?
- Departmental strategy
- Credible plan (sales, stock, markdown, margin, options, volume, etc)
What other input do you need to do this?
- Company strategy
- Trends
- Market Information
- Sourcing strategy
Which functions need to feed in?
Depends on the business type and model but will include
- Corporate Strategy
- Finance
- Design
- Sourcing
- Buying
- Merchandising
- Commercial Finance
- Central Merchandising
- Marketing
- Store Operations
- Web/Digital
Maintaining focus on what matters most
This can be quite a tight window for long lead-time areas like clothing and home.
In businesses with a wide product offering like department stores it can mean that some areas like electrical must have a high-level strategy long before they intend to buy. But in all retailers, it is critical to address these challenges and to decide how to handle outliers to be successful.
Each business needs the retail planning calendar to ensure that the main focus of its operation is the priority, and it does not get distracted.
Implementing the Retail Planning Calendar
Whilst it’s undoubtedly a balancing act for retailers to define their retail planning calendar, it is relatively straightforward. By looking future-back and today-forward there are a limited number of weeks to work with.
Slightly harder is agreeing a set of templates for each stage of the process and routines to support the decision making.
But again, by building from high-level macro information down to micro detail information as you move through the calendar, making each stage a build on the previous one and understanding the decisions needed at each stage, the templates become (fairly) clear to define.
Where it gets tricky is adoption. A good retail planning calendar will touch all of your processes. It will be the key driver of Buying and Merchandising activity every week, and it will place B&M activity at the core of everything else you do.
That means that not only does it transform how your B&M teams behave, but every function that touches B&M and all of the leadership team’s interaction with B&M.
How the Retail Planning Calendar drives success
Ensuring a retail planning calendar is effective and drives success will raise as much challenge around what you stop doing, as what you start to do.
The calendar drives success because it fully connects company strategy to delivery. It apportions the available time to the right task, at the right time, in the right depth to ensure that top-down and bottom-up planning reconcile.
Executed well, and supported by an effective organisational structure and tools, it enables management to come out of the detail whilst retaining direction setting and visibility.
Adapting to new ways of working
The new way of working needs to be trained out, so that teams understand the whole picture and their part in it. The templates and interpretation of the historical information they hold and how to use it to inform the future are all skills which need to be developed.
A calendar may phase in over 3 or 4 halves/seasons/years depending on the start point. But it may be the leadership team who need to work quite differently and at different pace to ensure that the beginning of the calendar stays on time.
Only when the upfront strategy is done well, to time and shared effectively will the calendar really deliver.
Need a hand defining and implementing your Retail Planning Calendar?
At First Friday, we work with many clients to develop calendars that are effective for their business, guiding on the pace of implementation and the support required – be that organisational design, systems, tools or team building and coaching. Because delivering the required outcomes means being in control of the journey.
Learn more about our Retail Consulting services, or get in touch to speak with one of our retail experts.
