172 VIEWPOINT Retail planning is the new supply chain crisis EYTAN DANIYALZADE: TOOLIO With clearer data, quicker forecasts and more aligned teams, Toolio helps retailers streamline their planning processes 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disconnected platforms, reconciling conflicting reports, and trying to build a picture of performance that is already outdated by the time it’s assembled.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 twothirds of their time just cleaning and compiling data, according to McKinsey & Company’s report How analytics and digital will drive nextgeneration 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 Toolio is a cloud-native retail planning platform purpose-built on Microsoft Azure to replace outdated, disconnected systems with a unified environment that connects financial planning, merchandise planning, assortment strategy and allocation.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 MICROSOFT’S PERSPECTIVE “ It is time for merchandising and planning teams to break free from the limitations of legacy spreadsheets and disparate data. Next-generation planning tools like Toolio deliver the agility and endto-end visibility required for buyers and planners to make smarter, faster decisions and spend more time driving strategy, not chasing data.” Kimberley McKinley Director, Retail Industry Strategist, Microsoft
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