Open to Buy

The same buying plan, in two different tools

Open To Buy (OTB) is coming to Look Cloud: the new merchandise planning module designed to answer exactly how much you can buy and why you deviated from the plan.

Traditionally, buying planning required maintaining manual Excel spreadsheets for each season, making them prone to errors and disconnected from actual execution.

With the OTB module in Look Cloud, there are no formulas to maintain: the plan, actuals, variance, and exceptions are automatically calculated using real ERP data.

How OTB is calculated: planned vs. actual

The system applies the same logic to two versions of the data: what was planned and what was reported by the ERP.

The detail can be dynamically expanded across both rows and columns, allowing you to compare the plan against actuals in dollars or units.

A plan tailored to your brand

The module includes an intuitive creation assistant organized into four simple steps:

You can define seasons, monthly or weekly segmentation, select clusters, and build the product dimension hierarchy in whatever order you prefer.

All the functionality at your fingertips

Four key actions are centralized on a single screen to manage the plan over time:

• Seed Plan: Distributes a strategic growth target across the entire product hierarchy.
• Reforecast: Adjusts open periods by channel based on each channel's current trend.
• Recalculate: Automatically rebuilds the OTB from end to end after any change.
• Approve: Closes the working version and freezes the plan as the official reference.

Edit wherever it makes sense, and the numbers stay aligned

It doesn't matter which level you modify: whether department, category, brand, or cluster, change a value and the module distributes and recalculates the entire hierarchy.

The season moves forward, and the plan keeps its history

Each month that ends is closed. That actual history is exactly what is used to replan the remaining open months.

Every approval creates a snapshot: every time the plan is reforecast and approved, the module freezes a complete version of the plan (V1, V2, V3...). At the end of the season, you can review what was decided at each point in time and what changed afterward.

What was planned vs. what actually happened

You can analyze the information by period or across the entire season, in dollars or units, with the automatic branches ranked by their contribution to the variance.

And when more detail is needed, it doesn't stop at the cluster level

While the OTB Module plans purchases by period and cluster, with a single click you can move to Look Intelligence to perform seasonal analytics and demand planning at the SKU level.