In ARP the full assortment planning is covered, so the category manager has to decide in the review period of an assortment group, which article has to be activated for which store cluster and which articles has to delisted or listed.
As the listing process needs also the involvement of the supplier, ARP provides only a functionality to create dummy articles as a placeholder for the final listed article. Only the necessary information, which has to be provided by the category management (like COMS structure, GTIN, etc) will be entered in ARP.
- On the ARP home, click on "Range Planning" --> "Plan New Article"
The new dummy articles are visible in the Range plan and if they are planned as active in ARP for some of the store cluster, they are also counted as part of the planned new assortment. This will be relevant, if the check reports are used to see, if the planned articles exceeds already the maximum number of articles, which is given as a frame by the merchandize team.
To involve the master data team in the process, the dummy article information has to be transferred to them. This can be manually initiated at any time by the category manager by execution of the button ‘New Article Master Data Request’.
If the category manager does not push this manually process, latest with the approval of the range plan an email notification is sent to the master data team with the new dummy articles per supplier as attachments.
Note: the approval of the range plan is also the trigger, to send the MMS activation files to the master data team in separate email for the upload to MMS.
The sent email with the dummy article information should be used from the master data team, to contact the relevant supplier for the additionally necessary article data and to enrich the existing listing template with the already provided data in ARP. Double maintenance of the already entered data has to be avoided.
When the supplier sends back the additional information about the requested article, the article can be listed in MMS by the master data team.
If the activation of this file should be done together with the approval of the Range Plan in ARP , the dummy articles have to be replaced in ARP by the new listed articles. This can be achieved with the ‘Match’ function in ARP.
If new articles (listed last month) exist in the COMS structure of the dummy article, they can be selected and assigned in the below list of values.
After closing the dialogue the dummy article is replaced in the range plan by the new listed article attributes. Only the planning values for the activation of the dummy article will be kept. When the MMS activation files will be created by range plan approval or manual export, the activation of the new listed articles will be exported too.
Learn more!
Why don't I see newly created articles in my Range Plan? (ARP)