Assortment Planning for Head of Procurement, read from Oracle NetSuite
Ward ingests sales orders, inventory, purchase orders from Oracle NetSuite, runs assortment on it, and hands you the procurement read on a daily cycle.
Assortment Planning on NetSuite, for procurement
Here is assortment planning in plain terms. Ward analyzes sell-through by store cluster to recommend which SKUs to add, drop, or reallocate.
Merchandising wants Ward. You sign the contract. Ward filters to what a Head of Procurement can act on and drops the rest.
The mechanism. Ward clusters stores by demographic, traffic, and sales patterns, then measures SKU performance against cluster benchmarks.
Setup: Ward connects via SuiteTalk REST or SOAP APIs. Token-based authentication. Read-only access to your NetSuite instance.
Key capabilities
- SKU rationalization recommendations
- Whitespace opportunity detection
- Planogram optimization inputs
- Store cluster segmentation
Chat
Ask anything. Ward routes to the right agent and returns cited answers.
I pulled Store 37’s last 28 days against the chain baseline. Two root causes, both compounding.
| Signal | Finding |
|---|---|
labor_efficiency | Rev/labor-hour −22% vs. cluster, staffing mismatch at 11a–1p peak |
inventory.fresh | Fresh fill 83%, backroom replenishment lag at 2–4p |
promo.lift | BOGO crackers cannibalized Brand Y by 28%, net category +6% |
Recommend: re-baseline Store 37 schedule against true peak, raise replen window to 1p, and review the BOGO before next cycle.
labor_scheduling…
Reporting
Pinned views built from saved data-lake queries. Every number re-derivable from its SQL.
| Model | Horizon | MAPE |
|---|---|---|
holt_winters | 4wk | 4.1% |
arima_sarimax | 13wk | 8.9% |
gbm_demand | 1wk | 2.1% |
bayes_hier | new store | 11.4% |
Sources
Connect external systems to the data lake.
| Name | Type | Last sync |
|---|---|---|
sap_pos_transactions | import | 2m ago |
sap_inventory_shrinkage | import | 2m ago |
sap_labor_scheduling | import | 14m ago |
retail_inventory_weekly | import | 1h ago |
retail_google_ads_daily | import | 1h ago |
retail_meta_ads_daily | import | 1h ago |
retail_ga4_website_daily | import | 1h ago |
Policies
Browse and manage Cedar access policies for your tenant.
| Policy ID | Effect | Resources |
|---|---|---|
merch-read-default | permit | Model::* |
finance-read-shrinkage | permit | Model::"inventory_shrinkage" |
vendor-blocked | forbid | Model::"labor_*" |
region-west-only | permit | Tenant::"acme" |
Why this combination
is its own problem.
Assortment Planning needs sales orders and inventory at minimum. Oracle NetSuite carries both, at the grain the model needs. That is the whole integration story: no middleware, no staging warehouse, no custom extract.
What Ward has eyes on.
Stock what sells. Cut what doesn't. Ward runs the model continuously rather than on a reporting cycle, which is why a finding lands the morning the pattern starts instead of at the end of the period.
Ward ingests NetSuite rather than replacing it. Sales orders, inventory, purchase orders come across on a read-only connection, get enriched with contextual data, and come back as findings. Your ERP is untouched.
What the first 90 days
actually look like.
-
01
Week 1: connect
Read-only credentials to Oracle NetSuite. Ward pulls from sales orders, inventory, purchase orders and starts building baselines. First cards land inside 48 hours, before baselines are stable, so you can see the shape of the output early.
-
02
Weeks 2 to 3: baselines
Ward needs roughly two weeks of history per store to separate a real deviation from normal variance. During this window the insight cards are directionally right and the thresholds are still moving.
-
03
Weeks 4 to 12: operating rhythm
Cards arrive every morning and get triaged like any other queue. Most teams find the volume settles into something one person clears in ten minutes. What matters is the action rate, not the alert count.
How Ward connects to Oracle NetSuite
Ward integrates with NetSuite SuiteCommerce, inventory management, and financials. Mid-market retailers get enterprise-grade insight cards.
Setup: Ward connects via SuiteTalk REST or SOAP APIs. Token-based authentication. Read-only access to your NetSuite instance.
Data Ward reads from NetSuite
Impact metrics with NetSuite
Data lake enrichment
Ward enriches NetSuite data with: Sales orders, Weather & events, Customer segments, Vendor performance, Market pricing data
Merchandising wants Ward. You sign the contract.
- ×Business sponsor saw the demo. You have a week to vet a vendor you didn't pick
- ×AI vendors price by seats and tokens. Total cost is unknowable until invoice three
- ×Multi-year commits with auto-renew. No exit if the pilot stalls
- ×Renewals come back 30% higher, with no room to push back and no benchmark to cite
- ×Security and DPA reviews start after the team has already committed
- ✓MSA, DPA, SOC 2 Type II underway, and architecture review available before signature
- ✓Month-to-month contracts. No multi-year lock-in. No auto-renew traps
- ✓Transparent pricing set by scope and store count
- ✓14-day insight guarantee. If Ward doesn't deliver, month two is on us
- ✓AI strategy, orchestration and reporting-layer work in enterprise grocery at nine-figure revenue. Reference calls available before signature
Enterprise SaaS spend grew 18% YoY. 53% of subscriptions are underused or duplicative. Source: Gartner
Frequently asked questions
Ward connects via SuiteTalk REST or SOAP APIs. Token-based authentication. Read-only access to your NetSuite instance. Data points include: Sales orders, Inventory, Purchase orders, Customer records, Financial summaries, Item fulfillment.
Merchandising wants Ward. You sign the contract. Ward solves this with automated insight cards: MSA, DPA, SOC 2 Type II underway, and architecture review available before signature. Month-to-month contracts. No multi-year lock-in. No auto-renew traps. Transparent pricing set by scope and store count.
First insight cards arrive within 48 hours of data connection. Ward needs approximately 2 weeks to establish stable baselines for your specific operation.
No. Ward sits on top of your existing stack. It is the proactive intelligence layer that watches your data continuously and delivers insight cards, so your team acts on findings instead of hunting for them.
Related solutions
See what assortment problems Ward catches.
Root causes, not just alerts. See it on your data.
Read-only to start · your LLM keys · SOC 2 Type II underway · or book a call directly
Find out what your data has been hiding.
Tell us about your operation. We’ll show you the problems Ward catches, and the ones your current tools miss.