White Paper

Why Grocery Assortment Planning Has Fallen Behind — and What Intelligent, Integrated Decision-Making Can Do About It

Grocery retail operates in a landscape reshaped by climate
volatility, geopolitical disruption, and sustained consumer
pressure on spending. Traditional assortment planning, built around periodic resets, national averages, and replenishment-first logic, is no longer fit for purpose.

The solution: an integrated decision layer that connects assortment with pricing, promotions, and space, and that provides every
stakeholder, from the buyer to the store manager, with a single,
commercially grounded view of the right answer.

UNLOCKING BILLIONS IN VALUE FOR CLIENTS IN 30+ INDUSTRIES

In this white paper, you’ll learn:

The Legacy Trap of 'Optimization'
Legacy category management tools were built to solve an operational question (how to efficiently fit cases on shelves), rather than the commercial question of incremental business impact. This operational focus has left retailers relying on slow, rigid planning cycles and manual spreadsheet work that fails to reflect rapid shifts in consumer behavior. Discover why traditional optimization models break down and how to escape the cycle of subjective buyer overrides.
The Power of Transference Modeling
Velocity metrics alone can mislead your strategy by rewarding high-selling items that merely cannibalize adjacent lines. Through advanced AI-driven transference modeling, retailers can now precisely quantify how demand redistributes across a category when a SKU is added or removed. Learn how to uncover true incremental value, protect high-margin mix shifts, and prevent the systematic deletion of critical "discovery" items.
The Integrated Commercial Decision
Assortment cannot be successfully optimized in isolation. A product’s true commercial impact is completely inseparable from its pricing, promotional treatment, and allocated space. Learn how connecting these levers into a single, shared decision layer replaces defensive, low-yield promotions with an agile strategy that drives sales density and protects your margins.

“The technology exists. The data exists. The machine-learning capability exists. What has been missing is the organizational will to connect them into a single, commercially grounded decision layer that every stakeholder can act on.”

James Griffiths

Global Head of RGM, Solutions Consulting, o9 Solutions

Breaking the habit of optimizing assortment in isolation

Assortment is not a standalone function—it is a commercial strategy. Ranging a SKU is fundamentally inseparable from its pricing, promotional cadence, and space allocation; optimizing one without the others creates locally rational decisions that damage global profitability.

Learn how a connected, single source of truth aligns buyers, finance, and supply chain around the same real-time assumptions to build a resilient, margin-protected shelf.

Explore these key questions

Retailers have never possessed richer loyalty data, basket histories, or market intelligence, yet translating these signals into the right in-store shelf experience remains stubbornly difficult.

Traditional category management is held back by rigid planning cycles that move in a fixed cadence, a reliance on national averages, and legacy tools whose outputs are routinely overwritten by buyer instinct. Digitization fails when it merely collects data without giving retailers the real-time commercial intelligence to act on it at scale.

Why Grocery Assortment Planning Has Fallen Behind — and What Intelligent, Integrated Decision-Making Can Do About It

Traditional grocery assortment planning is failing. Discover how an integrated decision layer connects assortment, pricing, promotions, and space to provide a single, commercially grounded view that protects your margins and drives retail growth. Download our whitepaper.