It'REAL: Unburdening Merchandise Allocation — From 8 Hours Manually to 2 Hours by System

By / Qiu Dehui (Merchandising Director, It'REAL)

Since founding in 2012, It'REAL has been dedicated to providing ""light vintage"" designed mid-range women's clothing for quality- and style-conscious urban women aged 25-40. With the expansion to over 300 stores nationwide, merchandise operational complexity has surged, especially the weekly routine merchandise allocation — once our frontline team's most time-consuming and labor-intensive core challenge.

The Burden of the Manual Era and Its Special DNA

When the store count reached one hundred, we relied entirely on manual allocation. Five to six merchandise specialists each manually processed nearly 10,000 lines of SKU data, and a complete allocation and replenishment process took over 8 hours. This was only under normal conditions — for temporary promotions, bestseller emergency restocking, or pre-holiday inventory preparation, workload and pressure grew exponentially.

More critically, as a designer brand, our merchandise structure has a special character: most designer款式 are novel in design, distinctly styled, with market demand outstripping supply. Inventory gaps pose extremely high demands on allocation flexibility, precision, and response speed — far exceeding industry averages.

Introducing SAC: From 8 Hours to 2 Hours per Allocation

Facing efficiency bottlenecks, we chose to introduce Burgeon Technology's SAC system, with the goal of dramatically improving efficiency and freeing the team from repetitive work to focus on higher-value judgment. We set a clear expectation: the system would take over over 80% of repetitive operations, compressing single allocation time from 8 hours to under 2 hours.

We know well that the system cannot entirely replace human judgment in complex scenarios — such as sudden store promotions causing sales surges, special pre-holiday stocking strategies, or temporary adjustments to new product plans, which still require specialists' quick intervention. Therefore, we built a collaborative model of ""system runs basic rules + humans handle special scenarios,"" freeing the team from high-frequency manual operations and shifting focus to strategy optimization and emergency handling.

Flexible Rules, Matching Every Real Scenario

What impressed us most about SAC is its flexibility and practicality. With abundant parameter configurations and permission settings, merchandise specialists can flexibly adjust based on business judgment — rather than being bound by rigid system logic. This is uncommon in systems we've used before and is a key advantage that makes us feel SAC is closer to real frontline work.

At the operational level, we advance rule updates on a ""quarterly"" basic rhythm — especially around several key points: mid-season, end-of-season, and before and after new product launches. We batch-optimize allocation strategies based on sales structure and inventory status. These rules are not static table templates but a dynamic strategy library that can be edited, switched, and configured — turning allocation into a plannable daily process.

Continuously Expanding System Value

Through efficient collaboration of ""automated efficiency"" and ""human judgment,"" we have achieved an 80% efficiency improvement in merchandise allocation work. Now, we are evaluating further extending the system's capabilities for initial store allocation management. Unlike allocation, initial distribution involves more upstream strategic dimensions such as new product distribution priority, sample quantity, and allocation ratios. From SAC's current strategy settings and allocation ranking features, we believe it can help us complete an integrated closed loop from ""new product configuration"" to ""allocation execution."

This article is featured in Burgeon New Vision, edited-in-chief by Sun Yihui, Chairman of Burgeon Technology, and produced by Burgeon Research Institute.