Optimizing Retail Assortment with Anaplan: A Client Success Story
Managing assortment in retail is all about balance, between visibility and operational realism.
Too much stock ties up working capital. Too little, and the customer experience suffers.
For a leading international luxury house, achieving that balance had become a strategic priority.
With Beyond Plans and Anaplan, the brand built a customized optimization model to continuously align product availability across its global boutique network.
Representativity, Availability, and Inventory: The Core Equation
In high-end retail, every boutique expresses the essence of the brand. Each model must be available in every size, with no stockouts, but without the excess inventory that erodes margins.
Until recently, assortment decisions relied on spreadsheets and local expertise, manual, time-consuming processes that varied widely from country to country.
The company needed a tool that could reflect real-world dynamics: sales velocity, cost constraints, and market expectations.
The goal: a stronger alignment between product availability, brand image, and economic performance.
A Tailor-Made Optimization Model Built on Anaplan
Beyond Plans designed a solution in Anaplan structured around two main modules:
- Assortment allocation, minimizing distribution and holding costs;
- Size optimization, maximizing product representativity while avoiding overstock.
Anaplan’s Optimizer engine integrates a wide range of business constraints:
- logistics and storage costs,
- minimum quantities per SKU,
- size continuity requirements,
- commercial priorities and geographic clusters,
- gender balance for unisex collections.
By feeding data from sales, costs, and market profiles, the model generates the ideal combination of articles and sizes for each boutique.
The merchandising teams remain in control, they can adjust, simulate, and compare scenarios directly within the platform.
“Our role is to make decisions clearer.
Data only has value when it truly supports day-to-day operations.”
— Consultant, Beyond Plans
Tangible Results, No Frills
From the very first iteration, the model delivered measurable impact:
- –25% reduction in inventory value,
- –35% to –40% fewer stockouts,
- +15% improvement in market-level distribution efficiency,
- and a more agile planning rhythm, now updated several times a year.
Merchandising now benefits from a clear view of product availability and actionable levers.
Decisions are no longer based on instinct, but on reliable, data-backed scenarios.
A Collaborative Journey Anchored in Adoption
The project was co-built with the business teams.
Each constraint and business rule was modeled in Anaplan with the end users, ensuring they could understand and operate the model autonomously.
Training and testing were integrated progressively, avoiding any “big bang” rollout.
The result: natural adoption, because the solution speaks the same language as its users.
“At Beyond Plans, we stay alongside teams until the solution lives on its own.
Our mission is to anchor performance in operational reality.”
A Sustainable, Scalable, and Extendable Model
The application integrates seamlessly into the client’s existing Anaplan ecosystem (financial planning, retail forecasting, etc.) and is designed to evolve toward new use cases:
- collection planning,
- boutique opening simulations,
- demand forecasting by product type.
The model is also fully scalable, it can be replicated across other brands within the group or extended to other premium retail networks.
Beyond Plans: Your Anaplan Partner for Merchandising Excellence
Beyond Plans partners with merchandising, supply chain, and finance leaders to design decision-making models that are both practical and enduring.
Our teams combine deep business understanding with advanced Anaplan expertise to turn complex operational challenges into clear, dynamic planning models.
FAQ: Optimizing Retail Assortment with Anaplan
How does Anaplan help manage assortments?
By modeling real-world constraints (costs, sizes, sales, stock thresholds), Anaplan automatically computes the optimal combination of products for each boutique.
What’s the difference between stock optimization and assortment optimization?
Stock optimization focuses on reducing excess inventory.
Assortment optimization balances product availability and brand image, directly enhancing the customer experience.
What are the measurable benefits of Anaplan’s Optimizer?
Fewer stockouts, less excess inventory, greater consistency across markets, and improved visibility for merchandising teams.
Why choose Beyond Plans for this kind of project?
Because Beyond Plans translates retail complexity into clear, scalable models.
Our support doesn’t stop at delivery, it’s built for long-term success.
