The WSSI

What is it? What is it for? What does it do? What makes it special? What is it? The WSSI, in its various forms, is the most commonly used fashion retailing merchandising control system. It helps merchandisers and buyers plan and then control their sales budgets and forecast, their planned stock levels in total and in their stores, and their supply chain (intake or receipts). What is it for? Retailing in general, and fashion retailing in particular, is all about managing margins (the difference between what merchandise is sold for, and what it is bought for), overheads (mostly property and staff), and stock. If you do not have a well structured business concept and plan, the WSSI will not help. If you do, it is your best tool for managing that plan. What does it do? It measures sales, intake and hence stock, comparing actual against a plan. It works in two time zones, the pre-season planned period of sales, and the inseason actual performance of the ranges or product groups. It allows you to follow a hierarchical top down breakdown of your company plans and actuals. These are typically company, category, department, range styles. What makes it special? Pre-season, the WSSI tells you what you need to do to buy the right amount of merchandise to have the correct stock to provide the optimum assortment to satisfy your customers, based on your sales plan. In-season, the WSSI continuously measures actual performance against plan, and gives you the opportunity to change forecasts, and to change buying plans, if such an opportunity exits. As it works across an entire season, it highlights both where buying (OTB) opportunities may arise in the future, as well as situations where stocks may be climbing above plan levels, so that you can take appropriate action ( cancel or reschedule forward commitments, or initiate markdowns to improve sales and/or reduce stock levels back to the required plan levels. WSSI and OTB (Open-to-Buy) If you read any manual or Website about stock control in retailing, managing OTB will always be, quite rightly, a central feature, for, without realistic forward buying plans, no retailer can prepare adequately to meet future sales demands. OTB is at the heart of the WSSI, and it is critically dependent upon accurate plan opening stocks for each sales planning and review period (typically in the case of the WSSI, Weekly Plan Stock values).

The WSSI uses Forward Weeks Cover ( i.e. at any particular point in time, Plan Stock is equal to the next n weeks Plan Sales) for calculating Plan Stocks. Whilst FWC calculations are not difficult in themselves, they are nevertheless very time-consuming to calculate, particularly in-season when you are likely to be reforecasting future sales in the light of current trends, possibly every week. Indeed, as the WSSI is normally run each week, this practice is usually the norm. As the Plan Stocks are recalculated, this in turn affects OTB, since the amount you can spend in any review period is just sufficient to the bring the Plan Stocks back into line. But planning both stocks and sales on a weekly basis is not right for everyone. We believe that a WSSI should be sufficiently flexible for planning sales perhaps weekly, and stocks monthly, since this may give retailers more breathing space for planning future deliveries of merchandise. Furthermore, although planning stocks by means of Forward Weeks Cover is a widely-accepted and long-established calculation method, there may well be instances where setting absolute values ( e.g. /$ 25000) may be preferable. Our view is that a well-crafted WSSI should be able to accommodate various means of planning stock levels. What merchandise is suitable for the WSSI? Although the WSSI is mainly used by Fashion retailers, any merchandise that has a high level of seasonality in its trading patterns; e.g. Toys in the run-up to Christmas, or Gifts may well benefit from being managed with WSSI methods. Other benefits of the WSSI Although the main focus of the WSSI is the control of open-to-buy, its layout can easily be extended to report other critical information such as stock-turn, margin %, income, GMROI,and average selling prices of both stock and sales. Why the WSSI as a spreadsheet? This is a very good question. Many commercial WSSIs are built-in to larger all-embracing retail systems, which embrace POS, planning, and a host of reporting modules. But if you already have an effective POS system, it can probably export sales and stock data in a form that can be accessed by a spreadsheet, so there is no need to replace your existing POS system simply to acquire the WSSI. In addition, the included WSSI may be too inflexible for your needs, and so you have to adapt your requirements to that of the softwares capabilities. Most businesses probably use spreadsheets for a wide variety of tasks, and so there are many people who are proficient in using them.

Since many organisations already have the spreadsheet systems installed, the only additional requirement is add the spreadsheet WSSI to their list of applications, and to make available the relevant data from their POS system. This can make the acquisition of a spreadsheet-based WSSI both very costeffective, and very easy to install. We use Excel for preference, since we believe it a very efficient medium for the WSSI, but in addition, many other spreadsheet applications can both read and write Excel files. In addition, you can share an Excel workbook in a networked environment, so that several users can access it. With this facility, you can build an Excel WSSI workbook for an entire company, with separate totals for each buying department, as well as consolidated summaries for the company. Technical details on how it works can be supplied on request. They will depend on the nature of your business For more details please contact mailto:stphnbrindle@gmail.com?subject=WSSI or to return to our Website: http://planningmachine.co.uk Alternatively, if you would like an informal discussion about the WSSI please telephone us : (44)1189 345391 - or if you would like to see a live demonstration, we can arrange this via Skype just contact us at stephenbrindle Stephen Brindle The Merchandise Planning Machine