A new location needed an opening inventory plan for roughly 6,000 products. There was no sales history, because the location did not exist yet.
That leaves two default failure modes, and most openings pick one of them:
Both feel like decisions. Neither leaves anything behind you can correct later.
We built the plan out of explicit, visible assumptions instead of hidden ones.
Every product's opening quantity traced back to a stated assumption: comparable location, category index, expected footfall, assortment role. Each assumption sat in the open where it could be challenged before opening and corrected after.
The mechanics were right on day one. Case packs, MOQs, supplier lead times and shelf-life constraints were built into the plan rather than discovered during the first week.
Launch planning is a master data stress test. Wrong case sizes, duplicated SKUs, products mapped to the wrong category and delisted items still active all surface here, and it is much cheaper to find them before the doors open.
The first month of real data settled an argument that would otherwise have run for a year. One national opening plan would have been wrong almost everywhere. Regions did not want the same assortment, fulfillment hubs did not have the same delivery reliability, and customers in each of them did not buy on the same rhythm. The expensive lines with short shelf life exposed all three differences at once, because on a product that expires there is no room to be wrong twice.
When opening a location, avoid the two defaults: copying another location one to one, or letting every category manager guess independently. Write the assumptions down where they can be argued with. A plan built from visible assumptions gets better the moment real data arrives. A plan built from private opinions just gets defended.
Write the assumptions behind every opening quantity down where they can be argued with, instead of copying another location or collecting private guesses.
The Cash Scan turns your own data into four documents in seven days: where your working capital is sitting, which SKUs are costing you sales, and your planned media budget translated into required units by week. $1,500, credited in full against the Sprint, and findings in seven days or you do not pay.
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