Monday morning for most fashion planners looks the same, whether the title is demand planner, buyer or merchandise planner. Open the ERP, pull the stock report, the open orders and last week's sales. Paste them into the spreadsheet. Read the emails from suppliers about delays and from sales about a customer who wants more of a style. By lunchtime the planner knows a lot about the business and has not made a single decision yet.
The work itself is not the problem. Planners are good at it. The problem is that the week starts with collecting information instead of acting on it, and that the things that really need attention are mixed in with everything that does not.
This article is about turning that around: starting the planning week from a short list of decisions, each with a reason and a deadline, instead of from a pile of reports. What belongs on that list, how to keep it honest, and how to share it across a team.
Why reports make a poor starting point
A report shows a state: what is in stock, what is on order, what was sold. It does not say what to do about it, or by when. The planner has to read every line and decide which ones matter, and that work is repeated every week, for every report, for every brand.
Three things go wrong as a result.
- **The urgent hides in the large.** A report with two thousand item options shows the five that will run out before their next delivery on the same terms as everything else. - **Deadlines are invisible.** An order that needs to be placed this week to arrive in time looks exactly like one that can wait a month. - **Nothing is ever finished.** A report never tells you that you are done. There is no point at which the planner knows they have covered what matters.
A worklist fixes all three. It shows only what needs a decision, it ranks by consequence, and it gets shorter as you work.
What belongs on the planner's worklist
The specific items differ by business, but in fashion the same categories come back.
**Orders that must be booked now.** For every product, there is a last week to order and still have the goods arrive before they are needed. That week depends on the lead time, including any factory closures in the production window. Orders past that point belong at the top of the list.
**Decisions that were made but never finished.** Order suggestions accepted into the basket but never ordered. Orders sent to the ERP but not yet confirmed there. Each day they wait eats into the lead time they were calculated with, and it is easy to assume they are done.
**Products that will run out.** Items where the stock projection shows a shortfall before the next delivery, with the lost sales that follow. Not all of them can be saved, but the ones that can need to be found while there is still time.
**Purchase orders worth flying.** Orders on a long sea journey where switching to air would actually prevent a shortfall. This list should be short. If it is not, the rule behind it is too loose. We wrote about that decision in our article on air freight in fashion.
**Materials.** For brands that buy fabric and trims themselves, material bookings that need to be placed to meet the order dates, and materials that run out before anything can arrive.
**Housekeeping.** New styles that need setting up before they can be planned, and old ones that can be removed because they hold no stock and no orders. Small items, but a plan full of dead styles is harder to read for everyone.
**Shared tasks.** Questions and follow-ups the team has raised on specific products, so they do not live only in someone's inbox.
Keep the list honest
A worklist only works if people trust it. Two things undermine that trust quickly.
**Items that keep coming back after they have been handled.** If a purchase order has been discussed with the supplier and a decision taken, it should not sit on the list every Monday. Planners need a way to set an item aside for a while, or permanently, without hiding it from colleagues who may see it differently.
**Counts that do not match.** If the list says eight items and the planner finds six, the list loses its authority. The number on the tile and the rows behind it have to agree, and set-aside items should be counted openly rather than silently dropped.
There is also a balance to keep between showing too much and too little. An air freight list that flags every late order trains people to ignore it. One that only flags orders where flying would actually close a gap is short enough to act on.
Make it a team list
In most planning teams, more than one person works on the same brand. A personal to-do list in a notebook or an email folder does not help the colleague covering on Friday.
The worklist works best when it belongs to the brand: everyone sees the same open tasks, whoever created them, and anyone can pick one up. Comments on a product should be able to turn into tasks when they need action, and back into comments when the action is done. A progress view helps too: how much of the range has been planned this week and forecast this month, and how many tasks have been solved recently. It gives the team and its manager a sense of where the week stands without another report.
How Fashion Planner helps: Your assistant
In Fashion Planner this is the job of **Your assistant**, the brand dashboard each planner opens first. It is a set of tiles, each counting the item options or orders that need a decision, and each opening the list behind it so you can act straight away.
The tiles cover the categories above: **Orders to book this week**, **Basket not ordered**, **Pending orders** for companies that send their orders to the ERP from Fashion Planner, **Options with potential lost sales**, **Purchase orders to check for air freight**, the material tiles, **Options to be activated** and **Styles to delete**. Lead times on the tiles include registered factory closures.
The air freight tile now only flags an order when flying would actually help: when the order's own size runs short before it arrives, or when the item option's availability drops between the order's departure and its arrival. Rows can be muted for one to four weeks or permanently. A mute applies to you only, and the tiles leave muted rows out of their counts and say how many are muted, for example "8 (1 muted)".
Below the tiles, the progress section shows the share of the range planned this week and forecast this month, the tasks solved, and every open task on the brand, not only your own. Comments can become tasks, and an open task can become a comment again. You can read more about the planning behind the tiles on our inventory planning page.
Start the week with decisions
A planning routine will always involve reports, emails and conversations with suppliers and sales. The difference is where it starts. A week that starts with a short, honest list of decisions, each with a reason and a deadline, spends its time on the products that need it. A week that starts with reports spends its first day finding out what those products are.
If you would like to see what your own worklist would look like on Monday morning, request a demo and we will show you with your own data.
