Take control of merchandise financial planning in a shifting market

Merchandise financial planning (MFP) should be the foundation of any retailer’s strategy, aligning inventory, pricing, and promotion decisions with broader financial goals. Success rests on ensuring the right products arrive at the right place at the right time. But for that to happen, you need the right data and the right tools. Without them, decisions can take too long and value is quickly drained.

It's no easy task to make strategic decisions when factoring in a complex ecosystem of internal supply chain, finance, and product teams, together with external retail, e-commerce, and wholesale partners, all while collaborating with suppliers and consumers. 

As a merchandise planner, you might be asking yourself why — all too frequently — you are forced to navigate disparate data sources, reconcile conflicting reports, and spend hours manually updating spreadsheets. 

At the best of times, these outdated processes waste valuable time and introduce bias and errors that can undermine business performance. In an era of economic volatility, shifting consumer behaviors, and omnichannel complexities, they suffocate agility, threaten performance, and erode margins. 

Add an additional layer of tariffs, inflation, and recessionary fears and it simply becomes unsustainable. Disruptions such as these demonstrate the vital role of MFP as your best first response. MFP connects critical stakeholders for reaching faster consensus and decisions — the key to achieving agility.

The need for connected retail planning

The inability to plan effectively is your biggest impediment to responding quickly and effectively to a fast-changing market, where consumers have less money to spend. Time is one of your most valuable assets. 

The longer it takes to detect and address issues such as excess markdowns and misallocated inventory, the greater the impact on revenue and margins. The planning process is where these issues start, and by the time disruption inevitably shows up, it is already too late. Siloed tools and data have built-in blind spots that can allow these problems to slip through undetected.

If it's taking you too long to read changing demand signals, make sense of them, and see vital patterns, then decisions at all levels will be marked by errors which could negatively impact your margin and sales downstream.

Depending on the tools you use, planning can either be the problem that turns consumer and market change into missed opportunities — or your best tool for gaining agility, resilience, and competitive advantage. 

How do we make sure it's the latter?

Four ways an out-of-the box solution solves MFP challenges

Your planning process must be evidence-based and deliver real-time insights on demand to support rapid decision-making. A streamlined, technology-driven approach is no longer optional — it’s a competitive necessity.

With the right MFP solution, advanced tools and analytics allow you to streamline decision-making, improve collaboration, and optimize operations across all channels. 

Let's look at the four ways you can transform your planning processes with an integrated, out-of-the-box MFP solution.

1. Connect disparate data sources: If information is scattered across various systems, teams find themselves operating with incomplete or conflicting information, leading to poor forecasting and missed opportunities. By eliminating silos and unifying data from multiple sources into a single, accurate platform, everyone — from executives to merchandise planners — works with consistent, up-to-date information.

2. Strengthen collaboration across business functions: MFP doesn’t happen in a vacuum — it requires coordination between finance, marketing, supply chain, and store operations. Today, the ability to respond in real time to shifts in demand or supply chain constraints is crucial. The right tools enable you to model different scenarios, forecast outcomes, and adjust strategies proactively rather than reactively.

3. Support omnichannel retail strategies: Traditional planning tools often fail to account for the complexities of e-commerce, physical stores, and third-party platforms, treating them as separate planning activities, which leave you unable to optimize across multiple touchpoints. An effective MFP solution will integrate all sales channels, ensuring a cohesive approach that maximizes revenue and minimizes overstock or stockouts. 

4. Surface actionable insights: When decision-making is based on backward-facing siloed data, past experiences, intuition, or static reports, you respond to issues after they arise instead of predicting trends and optimizing operations in advance. Accurate, advanced forecasting and predictive analytics allow you avoid hours spent reconciling spreadsheets, and instead focus on optimizing assortments, pricing strategies, and promotional activities based on real-time insights. 

The impact of an MFP solution across your organization

A robust MFP solution brings all key merchandise planning processes together in one place, allowing you to manage diverse channels, currencies, and localized strategies with real-time visibility while setting clear targets and KPIs during pre-season planning. 

• Financial and operational plans stay agile through accurate reconciliation, fostering collaboration across teams. In-season, you can monitor performance, make dynamic adjustments, and respond quickly to sales and inventory trends. 

• Open-to-buy management enhances decision-making by using real-time demand signals to optimize stock levels and margins. 

• Scenario planning simulates the financial impact of different strategies to proactively manage risk and maximize opportunities.

By integrating these processes into a single, data-driven platform, you gain agility, accuracy, and efficiency, transforming planning from a challenge into a strategic advantage.

A streamlined planning process is one that achieves consensus, is quickly executable, and is results-driven. For this, you need a tool that helps everyone speak the same language. With the right solution in place, your organization can achieve several far-reaching benefits, including:

• Strategic alignment: Better coordination means everyone is pulling in the same direction, working toward shared goals instead of operating in silos — this leads to smarter decision-making and a more cohesive strategy.
• Sales forecasting: By analyzing market trends and real-time conditions, you can make more accurate forecasts and tweak plans accordingly, staying ahead of demand shifts and customer expectations.
• Operational and cost efficiency: Automating planning processes isn’t just about saving time — it also reduces human errors, cuts down costs, and speeds up decision-making. 
• Inventory management: Aligning inventory with demand ensures you have just the right amount of stock — enough to meet customer needs without excessive storage costs or waste.
• Risk management: By simulating different scenarios and identifying vulnerabilities in advance, you can stay resilient and adapt quickly when challenges arise.
• Increased agility: If you can respond quickly — whether it’s adjusting pricing, launching new campaigns, or shifting production — you gain a huge competitive edge. 
• Maximized profit margins: By fine-tuning pricing and promotions strategies, you can strike the perfect balance — offering greater value to customers while ensuring you hit your financial targets.

Turn MFP into a strategic asset

For retailers facing unprecedented disruption on a global scale, how you approach MFP can become your biggest advantage or greatest risk. It’s no longer just about managing sales forecasts but about creating an agile, coordinated, data-driven organization that reaches consensus quickly — all the necessary capabilities for thriving in uncertainty. 

The right tools don’t just ease your workloads — they drive smarter decisions for stronger financial results. This shift not only solves today’s challenges but turns planning into a strategic asset that anticipates change instead of just reacting to it.

The Anaplan Merchandise Financial Planning application helps retailers boost revenue with predictive forecasts and improved planning accuracy. Powered by trusted data and built for collaboration, our out-of-the-box, integrated application enables faster decision-making by showing the immediate impact of changes on forecasts — so you can stay agile and drive results.