Prepack Maintenance and Fashion Allocation Planning  

Use

Prepacks are integrated into the allocation planning process, along with key figures for style, color, and assortment planning. This helps increase sell-through and reduce markdowns through more intelligent prepack allocation.

In the SAP system, a generic article represents what the fashion industry calls a style.

Features include:

·         Ability to define prepacks for a given generic article using existing quota scales (size curves) or by manually entering size distributions for the generic article. You can define standard single-color, mixed color, and color-independent prepacks (for example, footwear).

·         You can group together stores that have similar sales performance by merchandise category. and assortment. You can predefine groups, or create them as needed during the allocation planning process.

·         If you expect to replenish a new generic article from distribution centers during the season, you can plan prepack and unit putaway quantities at the same time.

·         You can have the system automatically generate follow-on purchase orders. Whenever the distribution to stores changes, the purchase orders are automatically updated. When final distribution is confirmed, you can generate stock transport orders from the distribution center to the stores.

Integration

The prepack allocation planning transaction (WSTN11, WSTN13) links several prepack articles to a generic article and defines the structure of these prepack articles. Allocation tables and vendor purchase orders can be generated and kept in synchronization. You can use planned data from Merchandise and Assortment Planning (MAP) to verify whether the allocation plan corresponds correctly to the style plan, style/color plan, and assortment plan.

Prerequisites

This transaction can handle generic articles that have two characteristics or less. Usually these are either color and size, or only size.

For the prepacks defined within this transaction, only variants of the selected generic article can be assigned as components. Prepack articles containing variants of different generic articles must be created with the integrated article maintenance and standard allocation functions.

Activities

You define the prepack components using a matrix view. The system uses the characteristics as follows:

·         One of the characteristics is used to differentiate prepacks (for example, single color prepacks and mixed color prepacks) and will be displayed in the matrix rows.

·         The other characteristic is used for component distribution within the prepack and will be displayed in the matrix columns. You can apply quota scales to this characteristic (for example, size curves).

You have to define a sequence in Customizing for the characteristics involved. The sequence determines which characteristic should be displayed in the rows and which in the columns of the matrix. The system will take the characteristic that comes first in the sequence as the row characteristic.

Assume that the characteristics you use are color and size. Since color is generally considered to be the primary characteristic in a style plan, you must define the sequence so that the color characteristic comes before the size characteristic.