First Allocation - Parameters

Parameters are variables that have a direct impact on the First allocation calculation.  Let's see the list of customizable parameters

Parameters for Product Selection

- Select a pre-created product category. Is the most common alternative to select products

- Create a new product category by introducing references or barcodes manually

- Create a new product category by choosing products one by one

Important: Click on “Create new set of products” to show the option 2 and 3. Then, select a parent category for new products to be attached to and a name for the new product set.

Parameters to define the group of Comparable items

Nextail’s first allocation module will suggest a group of comparable products for each item you want to introduce in the stores. Remember that, as there are no sales data for new products, we need to find comparable items in order to calculate their demand forecast.

For each product, it is possible to edit the indicated category of comparable products.

There are 3 different alternatives to choose the store category:

- Select the desired store category for each product, automatically unblocking it for first allocation.

- Assign stores to selected products by applying filters (tick boxes of desired products first).

- Upload the Layout Master file with the list of the products and corresponding stores.

The store selection should follow the Assortment or layout decided during the Buy process to avoid stock balance problems. The tool will calculate a forecast for store-product combination and will propose what is considered an ideal stock with the only limitation of bought stock, without considering whether there is a good balance or not between buy and layout.

Define the scope of your first allocation scenario:

- Brand

- Warehouse

- Store category: it can be left empty since the stores will have been selected in the previous step. Fill it in only if all the products in the scenario need to be sent to the same stores.

- Calendar plan: a calendar plan must be selected to be able to process the order.

Select the parameters that will influence the demand forecast calculation:

- Allocation date: use the date to calculate the correct seasonality, improving the final results for that scenario. The default value for pre-allocation will be the day when orders arrive at WH, and for FA or pending orders, it will be selected today. There is a limit to select a date of one year from now, as it doesn’t make sense to do a FA and we need to limit seasonality precalculations.

- RO generation mode: It allows us to decide if we want the generation of the normal RO, a heavier and more complete RO or none.

- Planning horizon (days): the period of time, measured in days, for which the engine will calculate the demand forecast.

- Forecast weeks: the number of weeks the engine will take to analyze past sales from comparable products to calculate the demand forecast. These weeks refer to the X first weeks since the comparable items first arrived in the stores.

- Weight for each week (%): Related to Forecast weeks, the weight given for each week. The total sum of the weights must be 100% being, "week 3" for this example being the most recent week.

- Option "Enable multi sales threshold":  The option "Enable multi sales threshold“ calculates for 1 scenario 10 different FA proposals changing the sales threshold, with a default selected in the bar. The other values are 0, 3, 5, 7, 10, 13,15, 20, 25, 30. If the option is unchecked, each product has its own threshold configured in the products page.

What’s next?

After you have created the scenario, Check the results