Kirkland’s makes assortment planning change

The 330-unit specialty retailer Kirkland’s is looking to grow sales following a dramatic upgrade to its assortment planning process.

The company switched from a manual system running on Microsoft Excel to Oracle’s portfolio of assortment, financial, location and item planning solutions. Kirkland’s work with Veltio, the leading consultancy in the design, implementation and tuning of Oracle planning and optimization solutions for the retail industry.

"The implementation of these planning tools has improved the planning process and communications between teams giving us the ability to make faster, better informed decisions," said Tripp Stevens, senior director of planning and allocation at Kirkland’s.

Veltio configured Kirkland's assortment planning solution to address the retailers specific challenges. The one-of-its-kind AP platform provides a science-driven, automated process that creates sales plans by item, store and week, according to Veltio. The insights of the user-friendly program drive allocation decisions and offer guidance to maximize SKU productivity by store cluster and greater visibility to sales performance and tier strategies.

Integrated with Veltio's integrations of merchandise financial planning, location planning and item planning, the customized AP system replaced Kirkland's Home's manual process with an automated platform that ties financial plans and allocation decisions to the assortment planning and assortment creation strategies.

"Kirkland's needed automated systems that increased communication between teams," said Joe Martin, vice president of strategic consulting at Veltio."Veltio's configuration of an assortment planning suite allows for peak efficiency in a fully-scalable platform that will grow along with Kirkland's for years to come."