Open-to-buy, managed live by the whole team
A 16-store sport retailer turned its weekly open-to-buy spreadsheet into a live, shared dashboard — and stopped overshooting budget by six weeks.
Outcome
+8% budget efficiency
Network
16 stores · sport
Measured outcomes
+8%
Budget efficiency on late-season opportunistic buys
5 min
OTB recomputed, per category per month
0
Weekly reconciliation meetings
What's wired up
Systems connected
ERP / retail management
Invoices · live
Supplier POs
Confirmed & pending
Buying workspace
Per-category budget
Before · After
Before
One number, one person, one week stale
Open-to-buy lived in a spreadsheet the merchandising lead rebuilt by hand every Friday from ERP invoices, supplier emails and pending POs. By Monday it was stale, and three buyers were committing in parallel without seeing each other's moves.
After
A live conversation on shared truth
Every committed amount, confirmed delivery and pending order surfaces in one shared dashboard. Each buyer sees their available budget by category and month in real time, recomputed every five minutes, with an alert when a category nears its cap.
The challenge
It was the retailer's biggest seasonal budget yet, with fresh supplier deals on running and fitness. Buyers had committed early on high-volume categories, leaving room for late-season opportunistic buys.
By mid-season nobody could tell where the open-to-buy actually stood. The shared spreadsheet showed €280k remaining; supplier orders showed €340k already committed. Three meetings later the team realised they had overshot — by six weeks.
The open-to-buy lived in a file updated once a week. Every Friday the merchandising lead pulled ERP invoices, supplier confirmations and pending POs, then rebuilt the tracker line by line. By Monday it was already out of date.
What we changed
Solya plugged into the ERP, the supplier feeds and the team's PO system through its data layer. Every committed amount, confirmed delivery and pending order now surfaces live in one shared dashboard.
The merchandising lead stopped being the bottleneck — and the only person who knew the real number. They went back to being a buyer and a strategist.
How decisions get made
Each buyer sees their available budget in real time, by category and by month. When one commits €40k on a running supplier, the others see the open-to-buy update before the next coffee.
The open budget is recomputed every five minutes per category per month, so it is always current. When a category hits 90% of its allocation, Solya flags it to the buyer and the merchandising lead.
Where it lands
There is no weekly rebuild and no reconciliation meeting. The three buyers and the merchandising lead work from one source of truth instead of four conflicting exports.
The open-to-buy stopped being a Friday battle. It became a live conversation the whole team can join.
What changed
- +8% budget efficiency on opportunistic late-season buys
- Open-to-buy recomputed every five minutes, per category per month
- Zero weekly reconciliation meetings — one shared number, no surprises
Related: see how continuous replenishment runs the same live loop on stock, or how Solya's intelligence layer turns shared data into decisions the whole team trusts.
More use cases
A seasonal buy plan, signed off in one review
A 14-store apparel buyer had to cut next season's open-to-buy by 12% — and built a sharper plan on two years of live sell-through instead of intuition.
Move stock before markdown is the only option left
A 9-store streetwear brand turned twice-a-season panic transfers into a calm weekly lever — moving stock six weeks before markdown was the only answer left.
Allocation that finally knows the network
A 14-store apparel network still split each season with a rule written when it had 8 stores. Solya re-allocated on what every store had actually become.
From the blog
What is WSSI? Weekly sales, stock & intake planning
WSSI — weekly sales, stock and intake — is the weekly heartbeat of merchandise planning. It sets the financial frame, but it doesn't make the decisions.
Retail ERP vs a decision layer: what each does
A retail ERP is your system of record — it runs the transactions. It doesn't decide the SKU/store moves. That's a different layer, and often a missing one.
What does a retail merchandiser do? Role and skills
A retail merchandiser decides what a store sells, how much, and at what price. It's a decision job — and the decisions now outnumber the hours to make them.