The assortment planning software to protect sales and margin

When your store assortment lives in Excel, it drifts from the system that actually places orders. Teams lose track of which file is current, updates are not shared, and the range is a static grid nobody can act on quickly.

At scale it gets worse: a network with dozens of stores and hundreds of product families holds thousands of store and family combinations, impossible to review by hand.

The cost then shows up on both sides:

• Products a store should not carry keep landing in its orders, and turn into markdowns.
• Real gaps stay invisible: the range drifts from what each store's customers actually buy, so you leave sales on the table.

It is the same firefighting that retail supply chains hit when planning is disconnected. Assortment planning software fixes it at the source, turning the spreadsheet into one shared, live model that both defines the range and controls what can be ordered.

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Flowlity is built for multi-store retailers and distributors that carry many references across store formats of different sizes. It becomes relevant as soon as you run two or more stores with different product portfolios.

The people who use it vary, so the buyer may sit in product or category management, not only in Supply Chain:

• supply planners keeping orders clean,
• product or category managers owning the range,
• a dedicated assortment manager at larger retailers.

The clearest triggers to look at it now:

• replacing a legacy tool where the assortment lives outside planning,
• onboarding a new store format that needs its own range,
• responding to a purchasing tender (a request for proposal, or RFP) where assortment management is a stated requirement.

It is the strongest fit when your stores fall into tiers, when a real share of order lines are products that should not be in a given store, or when no one can explain why a reference is or is not replenished. A single location with a stable range does not need it yet.

Assortment sits inside Flowlity's retail inventory management software, alongside forecasting and replenishment, and retailers that get the range right can add 2 to 4% in sales through a more customer-centric product portfolio (McKinsey).

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Judge tools on three things: how they handle scale, how they govern exceptions, and how far the decision travels.

Scale. As your store network grows, you want typology or tier based management, so you change a whole group of stores in one action instead of editing thousands of rows. Bulk actions across many families, filtering by site, tag category or typology from the column headers, and saved custom views keep recurring reviews to seconds.

Exceptions. A clear place to activate or deactivate specific products per site, on all sites or a selection, with every override kept in a dedicated tab you can audit. Plus flexible tag logic that combines categories with and/or conditions to build precise selections.

Integration. Product and tag lists that export to Excel or CSV, and a tool that connects to your ERP.

The decisive criterion, though, is whether assortment connects to replenishment. Many tools only visualise the range; the ones worth buying enforce it, excluding out-of-range products from order proposals and keeping the assortment rule attached to every order.

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This is where Flowlity differs from merchandising-first suites. Flowlity does the store-level side of assortment: you decide which existing products are active in which stores, and that decision becomes an input to the order rather than a document planners consult.

You set a typology for each store and product family, and the matching products activate or deactivate automatically across the stores that match. You work from two views:

• a tag view, families across all stores in a matrix,
• a product view, reference by reference, with an active or inactive indicator per store.

Real ranges are never perfectly regular, so products outside the standard matrix, for example an item that should only sell in stores near the coast, are switched on manually for the sites you choose and recorded as exceptions.

From there the range drives store replenishment directly: products that are not active in a store are excluded from that store's order proposals.

Because assortment and Flowlity's AI-driven planning run on the same engine, a planner can tell whether a missing order is down to the assortment rather than the buffer.

Flowlity does not replace merchandise financial planning, open-to-buy or planograms. It makes the range you already decide actually control what gets ordered.

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It is connected to demand forecasting, supply planning and replenishment, so the shelf plan and the orders never drift apart. When a store changes format, its range moves with its typology instead of a manual rewrite, bulk actions push a change across many families at once, and product and tag lists export when you need them elsewhere.

A range is only useful if it stays current and shared. In Flowlity the assortment is a single source of truth the whole team works from, not a file passed around by email.

Because the range and the orders share one system, a change to the assortment is reflected in the next order proposals straight away, with no re-keying between tools.

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You do not need a perfect dataset to start. Flowlity works from data you already have:

• your store and product hierarchies,
• the typologies you already reason with,
• the sales, inventory and order data that already feeds replenishment.

A practical path is to define the tiers first (a basic, medium and large range per family), let products activate against them, then layer in the exceptions and refine as you learn, rather than freezing the business for a multi-quarter rollout.

Because the range and the orders share one system, the benefit shows up early: the first time out-of-range products stop appearing in a store's proposals.

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