Retail planning has to move faster across channels, categories, and markets. Merchandising teams need tools that can flex with new demand signals and shifting business models. And now, leadership is looking to IT to drive that efficiency.
The business sees planning problems, what they don’t see is that you’re holding the system together behind the scenes. You’re stitching together manual scripts, fixing broken data feeds, restarting batch jobs, and fielding daily Slack messages when something doesn’t sync.
Yet you’re also being asked to step back and evaluate whether your current planning tech can scale. You’re expected to find the efficiency gains, even though you’re spending most of your time patching a system that was never built for today’s retail environment.
Planning needs to become more agile. But right now, the stack is standing in the way.
94%
of retail execs report tech anxiety among in their organizations
42%
identified foundations and analytics as key to digital transformation
43%
believe digital transformation involves the automation of internal processes
Source: Valtech
IT is on the Hook for Planning Agility But Faces Bottlenecks
Your current tools, whether it’s Blue Yonder, spreadsheets, or in-house planning systems, are nearing their limit and it’s showing up in all the ways you’d expect:
Low adoption of existing tools – planners defaulting to spreadsheets and workarounds even when an existing systems exist that IT has to clean up
Excessive support tickets – every change (e.g., new cluster, allocation rule) requires engineering time and coding which bogs down you team
Data delays and integration fragility – markdowns, forecasts, and sales data often arrive late or incomplete
On-prem system fatigue – legacy tools are at or beyond capacity and expensive to maintain costing dev hours and additional hardware spend
AI-readiness gaps – legacy tools weren’t built for AI or advanced analytics, which limits your ability to support cross-functional data science and respond to leadership’s push for automation and smarter forecasting
Pressure from leadership – IT is being asked to evaluate whether existing planning tech can scale with growth
Related Content
Learn how Toolio Fits Your Tech Stack While Driving Planning Efficiency
Efficient Planning Without Rebuilding Your Stack
Planning isn’t just a business workflow, it’s a data and infrastructure system. The fix starts with retooling the foundation, not extending old limitations.
Toolio is a cloud-native, built-for-retail planning platform that does two things well:
Make planning faster, more accurate, and easier to maintain
Get IT out of the support loop, so you can focus on other strategic prioritie
Unifying planning eliminates reliance on patchwork systems and manual interventions, giving IT a sustainable, future-proof solution that reduces overhead, increases agility, and improves tool adoption.
Agile Planning Without Overextending IT
Here’s the impact of modern planning, side-by-side:
A Practical Path to Getting Planning Off Your Backlog
Unifying planning eliminates reliance on patchwork systems and manual interventions, giving IT a sustainable, future-proof solution that reduces overhead, increases agility, and improves tool adoption.
Audit your ticketing system (e.g., ServiceNow, Jira, etc.). How many are tied to data delays, failed syncs, or business logic updates from planning?
Audit your ticketing system (e.g., ServiceNow, Jira, etc.). How many are tied to data delays, failed syncs, or business logic updates from planning?
Where are planners still using shadow systems like Excel or Google Sheets? How often do you hear, “we had to do it manually”?
Start with ERP and inventory feeds. Expand to PLM, sales, and ecommerce, etc., for easy implementation with minimal risk and disruption..
See how Toolio handles the problems you’re dealing with now whether it’s reforecasting speed, data ingestion, or how our dedicated support team reduces IT involvement. These demos aren’t generic, they’re designed around the exact friction points your team’s already solving manually.
You’ll learn:
How our UI helps keep planners in the system and out of workarounds
How IT avoids getting pulled into every logic change
How clean integrations reduce sync failures and downstream tickets
This is how you quantify the pain, build internal support, and move forward.
Before Toolio, Magnolia’s planners relied on Excel, Domo, and NetSuite to manage inventory. The process was manual, disconnected, and required constant data wrangling.
With Toolio, they replaced all of that with one integrated platform.
Planning time dropped from 15 hours to 5 per week
Total efficiency improved by 30%
Inventory turnover increased, while stockouts decreased
Craig Smith
Sr. Merchandise Planner
“Being able to see a forward forecast has been especially beneficial in reacting to sales trends and staying in stock on items that are overperforming.”
What Changed?
One source of truth: Magnolia eliminated fragmented workflows with a single platform, reducing the number of tools IT needs to support
Cleaner data flow: Real-time syncs removed manual exports and sync failures
Less IT involvement: Planners make changes in the UI, no scripts or code needed
Magnolia’s results show what happens when the business gets faster and IT isn’t stuck gluing legacy systems together.
IT Doesn’t Need to Own Planning Forever
Planning is essential to the business, but the way it’s built today is costing you time, headcount, and strategic focus.
Toolio gives you a way to deliver on what leadership is asking for:
A planning platform purpose-built for retail
Aligns with the way your business actually works, no custom builds, no force-fitting tools.
A faster planning system
Speeds up reforecasting and in-season decisions. Planners stop defaulting to workarounds and stop escalating urgent tickets to IT.
Accuracy and agility
Aligns with the waAI automation, clean data, faster updates, and fewer silos mean the business can react without waiting on tech fixes.y your business actually works, no custom builds, no force-fitting tools.
You get time back to focus on high-priority projects
Reduced planning-related tickets and reactive support work, so your team can focus on other strategic initiatives.
Toolio doesn’t just solve today’s planning problems, it clears the way for tomorrow’s initiatives. By reducing reactive work, your team can finally prioritize what matters: AI-readiness, data unification, and delivering the digital transformation your leadership expects.
See Toolio In Action
The best way to understand what Toolio could do for you is to see for yourself. Get started with our team today!
