Assortment rationalization: Why retailers need to get it right
In this article, we will focus on assortment rationalization: what it is about, its benefits, and why every retailer should have a solid process for it.
Assortment planning solution
Drive sales, improve margins, and reduce supply chain costs with improved assortment planning
Improve customer choice and store profitability with RELEX rapid and flexible assortment planning software. Accurately analyze assortments to identify both underperforming and exceptionally performing products.
Finding the optimal assortment is critical to every retailer
Take advantage of shopper-focused, store-specific assortments that drive sales and improve margins while also reducing supply chain costs.
Key features
Unify your assortment planning on one platform. From demand and merchandise to supply chain and operations, RELEX helps provide maximum customer satisfaction by balancing sales and costs on one unified platform.
Benefits
Increase demand forecasting accuracy for better business results
Accurately predict demand to ensure the right stock, resources, and capacity are available to maximize sales and customer satisfaction at low cost.
Plan strategically to drive revenue growth
RELEX assortment uses a streamlined decision-making process to oversee cohesive strategic planning across categories and maximizes resource allocation efficiency to meet business objectives. This allows you to assess your investment’s effectiveness and adjust strategies and resources to maximize profitability. Gain a deeper market understanding to better capitalize on emerging trends and opportunities and drive revenue growth.
Efficiently manage SKU for sustained success
RELEX assortment offers an efficient decision-making process, allowing category managers to review their categories efficiently and allocate more time to strategic initiatives and growth opportunities. Through strategic SKU management, make informed decisions about the products to retain and discontinue. Minimize capital tied up in slow-moving SKUs, and free up liquidity for investment in high-performing products. Increase category gross margin to drive greater profitability and ensure sustained success.
Optimize new product introductions
RELEX attribute-based forecasting automatically sets relevant reference products for new items based on attributes such as category, brand, pack size, and price to more accurately predict the sales patterns of new products.
Drive cross-functional alignment
Make the impact of store-cluster and store-specific assortment changes visible across your business and improve communication to local teams with updates that are simultaneously available for forecasting, replenishment, planograms, and inventory planning.
Leverage forward-looking data
React to local needs and adapt assortments to changing demand by leveraging not only historical sales information but also store- and channel-specific forecasts.
Improve collaboration with stores
Mobile access to assortment and planogram information enables two-way communication between central teams and stores, allowing for efficient collaboration and making it easy for associates to suggest changes that can help match local demand.
IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Retail AI-driven Assortment Planning Solutions 2025 Vendor Assessment
RELEX has been recognized as a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Retail AI-driven Assortment Planning Solutions 2025 Vendor Assessment report. RELEX was named a Leader for strengths including automating, ranking and helping to manage assortments; easy-to-use interface and scheduling; and driving sales and margin results through partnership and continuous design.
Resources you might be interested in
We’ve accumulated a wealth of supply chain & retail expertise from our 1,500+ planning specialists.
Optimizing assortment differentiation to balance sales and costs
Finding the optimum balance between centralized and customer-centric assortment differentiation is a critical task. But how this optimum can be arrived?
How to improve customer-centricity with in-store assortment collaboration
While many retailers widely use category insight data such as product performance, area demographics, and demand patterns to produce more customer-focused assortments, they fail to leverage the knowledge of those closest to the customer – the local store staff.
Ready to transform your supply chain & retail planning?
We’re happy to discuss your business needs and share how our market-leading, unified platform can help you drive profitable growth across your sales and distribution channels. Discover why top industry analysts position RELEX as Leaders in the market.