Day 1, 14:10 — Room 1 ● Roundtables
Interactive Roundtables - Choose Your Topic & Get Talking!
Smart Assortment & Inventory
9. How High Return Rates Are Breaking Your Inventory Plan
Returns as a planning variable, not just a logistics problem — and what it takes to factor return behaviour into your buy and allocation decisions.
Tech Synergy
3. Moving from Weekly Recaps to Live Dashboards
What it takes to shift from retrospective reporting to real-time visibility, and why the hardest part is usually not the technology.
People & Collaboration
10. Breaking the Math vs. Magic Deadlock In Planning and Buying
The structural tension between data-led planning and instinct-led buying — and how teams that have resolved it actually did it.
Resilient Planning
4. How to Trade the Business When the Forecast Is Wrong
Mid-season pivots, in-season reforecasting cadences, and the decisions that separate brands that adapt from those that write off the season.
Presented by:
People & Collaboration
11. When to Ignore the Algorithm and Trust Your Merchant Gut
The cases where human override was right, the cases where it wasn't, and how to build governance that knows the difference.
Resilient Planning
5. The Tariff Effect: Replanning When the Rules Change Overnight
How brands are adjusting OTB, landed cost assumptions, and sourcing strategies in real time, and what a tariff-resilient planning process actually looks like.
People & Collaboration
12. Stopping Planning from Being the Department of No
How planning functions shift from constraint to enabler — and what changes when the rest of the business starts seeing them that way.
Resilient Planning
6. Building a Chase Strategy Into Your Initial Plan
Why agility has to be designed in at buy stage, not bolted on mid-season, and how to structure your open-to-buy to move when the market moves.
Smart Assortment & Inventory
7. Increasing Initial Buy Precision to Break the Markdown Cycle
The upstream decisions that create markdown pressure downstream and how sharper buying logic reduces the need to discount your way out.
Smart Assortment & Inventory
8. Knowing Exactly When to Pull the Plug on a Failing Category
The indicators, the governance, and the organisational courage it takes to exit a category before it becomes a write-off.
Tech Synergy
1. Why Your ERP Isn't Doing What You Need It To
The gap between what your system was promised to deliver and what your team actually uses it for, and what to do about it.
Tech Synergy
2. Getting Different Systems to Talk to Each Other
The integrations that matter most, the ones that keep breaking, and what good interoperability actually looks like in practice.
Day 2, 13:45 — Room 1 ● Roundtables
Interactive Roundtables - Choose Your Topic & Get Talking!
Tech Synergy
3. Making Sure Every Department Is Looking at the Same Data
The governance, definitions, and cultural shifts that sit behind a genuine single source of truth — and why the technology is usually the easy part.
People & Collaboration
10. The Seniority Gap: Training Junior Planners in a Hybrid World
How the fundamentals get transmitted when there's no trading floor, no shoulder-to-shoulder learning, and AI is doing more of the entry-level work.
Resilient Planning
4. Protecting Your Margin When Landed Costs Change Mid-Season
Practical approaches to cost shock: vendor negotiation, price architecture adjustments, and the point at which you pull the plug on a committed buy.
People & Collaboration
11. Why Your KPIs Are Making Your Teams Fight Each Other
How misaligned metrics create the cross-functional friction that no amount of collaboration workshops will fix.
Resilient Planning
5. Making Decisions When You Only Have Half the Data You Want
The discipline of acting under uncertainty — when to wait for better information and when waiting costs more than deciding.
People & Collaboration
12. Planning & Sustainability: From Compliance to Commercial Real
How regulatory pressure — EPR, Digital Product Passports, circularity mandates — is landing on planning teams, and what it practically changes about how you buy, allocate, and exit stock.
Smart Assortment & Inventory
6. Moving Beyond Last Year's History to Sense Current Demand
The signals worth trusting, the signals that mislead, and what a demand-sensing capability actually requires to work at speed.
Smart Assortment & Inventory
7. Stopping the Sold-Out-in-Core-Sizes Conversion Killer
Size availability as a commercial KPI — why it keeps being underinvested, what tracking it properly exposes, and how to fix the upstream decisions that cause it.
Tech Synergy
1. What to Look for When Buying New Planning Software
The questions most teams don't ask until it's too late — evaluating vendors, scoping implementations, and avoiding the mistakes everyone keeps making.
Tech Synergy
2. Keeping the Team on Board During a Tech Rollout
Change management from the inside: how to bring reluctant adopters along without losing momentum or the people who actually know the system.
Smart Assortment & Inventory
8. Finding the Right Balance Between Core Basics and Newness
How to protect your replenishment base while staying commercially relevant — and where most brands get the ratio wrong.
Presented by:
Smart Assortment & Inventory
9. Managing Inventory Across Web, Wholesale and Marketplaces
Channel-specific allocation logic, ATP visibility, and the inventory conflicts that emerge when every channel has different rules.