By Guest contributor |
Innovation is reshaping retail every day. From fluctuating consumer demand to global supply disruptions, brands are under relentless pressure to adapt. Over the past decade, the focus has largely been on optimising the supply chain, building omnichannel infrastructure and digitising customer touchpoints. But in the race to modernise, one critical area has been left behind: planning.
Despite being the nerve centre of retail operations, planning today remains heavily reliant on spreadsheets, static tools and siloed systems. Teams spend countless hours manually pulling data from disconnected platforms, reconciling conflicting reports, and trying to build a picture of performance that is already outdated by the time it’s assembled. For many retailers, planners spend approximately two-thirds of their time just cleaning and compiling data, according to McKinsey & Company’s report How analytics and digital will drive next-generation retail merchandising. That leaves very little room for the kind of high-value strategic work that actually moves the business forward.
This inefficiency has real consequences. When demand shifts, which it always does, retailers struggle to reforecast, rebalance inventory, or adjust strategies quickly enough. Stockouts become frequent. Excess inventory piles up. Margins shrink under the weight of promotions and markdowns. Retailers are seeing inventory swell, followed by aggressive discounting that cut deeply into profitability. Some brands wrote off millions in unsold stock, not because of poor demand, but because their planning tools couldn’t keep pace.
The problem is agility. Retailers don’t need more data; they need the ability to act on it quickly, confidently and collaboratively. That means giving planners the tools to build flexible forecasts, test scenarios and make data-driven decisions in real time. It means removing the friction between teams, aligning on a single source of truth and shifting planning from a reactive function to a proactive strategy driver.
That’s exactly the opportunity Toolio is built to deliver.
Toolio is a cloud-native retail planning platform purpose-built on Microsoft Azure to replace outdated, disconnected systems with a unified environment that connects financial planning, merchandise planning, assortment strategy and allocation. Instead of patching legacy workflows, Toolio reimagines the entire planning process, bringing together real-time data, AI-driven, intelligent forecasting and collaborative decision-making in one seamless platform all within Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power BI.
The difference brings speed and a new way for retail teams to operate. With Toolio, planners can build dynamic plans that adjust by stock keeping unit, store and week. AI-powered forecasting helps predict performance trends and seasonality with greater accuracy. Real-time ‘what-if’ planning allows users to model the impact of a promotion, supplier delay or demand shift in seconds, not days. These aren’t just feature upgrades, they’re capabilities that fundamentally change how retailers respond to uncertainty.
Most importantly, Toolio eliminates the need for constant reconciliation between departments. Merchants and allocators no longer work from different versions of the truth. Finance has direct visibility into how assortment decisions will affect topline targets. Store and channel teams gain access to smarter forecasts that actually reflect current trends. Everyone is working from the same data, towards the same goals, on the same timeline.
This kind of alignment has tangible results. Retailers using Toolio have reported a 30 per cent reduction in stockouts and a 20 per cent improvement in sell-through. One retailer reduced planning cycle time by more than 40 per cent, allowing their team to respond faster to market trends and avoid costly missteps. Even a 48-hour reduction in planning latency can be the difference between selling through inventory or taking heavy markdowns.
What Toolio enables isn’t just better planning, it’s better decision-making. It gives retailers the ability to zoom out and think strategically while maintaining the granularity needed to execute with precision. It shifts planners away from reactive firefighting and towards proactive, forward-looking strategy. It creates a new rhythm of collaboration across merchandising, finance and operations, one built on shared data, real-time feedback and trust.
Planning may have once been an operational back-office function, but in today’s retail landscape, it is the beating heart of competitive advantage. Brands that continue relying on spreadsheets and legacy tools are not just slower, they’re more vulnerable. Vulnerable to demand shifts, to margin erosion and to operational misalignment that compounds over time. On the other hand, brands that embrace intelligent, connected planning systems are better positioned to navigate volatility, seize emerging opportunities and grow sustainably.
In an industry where every decision counts, the edge doesn’t come from having more information. It comes from being able to act on it, decisively, collaboratively and quickly. Toolio delivers that edge.
Eytan Daniyalzade is CEO and co-founder of Toolio
Microsoft’s perspective
“It is time for merchandising and planning teams to break free from the limitations of legacy spreadsheets and disparate data,” says Kimberley McKinley, director of retail industry strategist at Microsoft. “Next-generation planning tools like Toolio deliver the agility and end to-end visibility required for buyers and planners to make smarter, faster decisions and spend more time driving strategy, not chasing data.”
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