TECHNICAL FIELD

The disclosure relates generally to retail assortment and more particularly to a system and method of an attribute-value combination analysis and assortment planner.

BACKGROUND

Traditional product assortment planning generally consists of a person, termed a “planner,” deciding what products a business will carry for a given sales period in response to consumer demand. These persons generally decide what products to carry based only on their feelings and rudimentary business intelligence. Such decisions may include identifying and relying on the qualities or characteristics of products that the planner believes the consumers are demanding.

In the fashion industry, for example, where a product is clothing, a product may be defined by characteristics of clothing, such as color, fabric, sleeve length and so on. In this case, the planner will have to select what clothing will be selected for a new assortment. In this regard, the planner identifies the combination of clothing characteristics that worked well in the past based on some metric the planner selects. The planner may then select from a catalog or design a new product having the characteristics that the planner deems important to add to the new assortment.

However, determining what combination of qualities or characteristics satisfies demand is difficult and compounded by the enormous number of products and attributes. Even when a planner has access to historical data, the combination of products and attributes is impossible for a planner to accurately parse into a set of combinations that would satisfy consumer demand. Therefore, previous solutions to plan product assortments have proven inadequate.

