For years, Excel has been the tool of choice for category and assortment planning. It is flexible, widely used, and deeply embedded in retail workflows. Most teams still use it to track sales, evaluate product performance, and manage pricing decisions. But the demands on modern assortment management have changed, and Excel can no longer keep up.
The problem is not Excel itself. The problem is silos.
Category managers today are expected to make faster and more granular decisions across hundreds or thousands of products. They must align pricing, margin, availability, trends, and competitive pressure. This must often happen weekly or even daily. Excel is not built for this level of speed, volume, or data variety.
One of the main challenges is data fragmentation. Sales data comes from one system, inventory from another, margin from finance, and competitor prices from manual research. In Excel, this all has to be stitched together manually. That creates friction, delays, and blind spots. The result is reactive planning. By the time a spreadsheet is fully updated, the underlying conditions may have already changed. And when teams do spot problems such as underperforming products or margin gaps, they lack the ability to simulate alternative actions or trace the root cause.
Excel also struggles with product relationships. Most assortments include products that influence each other, such as items that are bought together, cannibalize each other, or share materials. Excel treats every product as an isolated row. This makes it hard to understand the broader effects of a price change, delisting, or new launch.
These gaps are not just theoretical. According to McKinsey, companies that rely on manual tools for product portfolio decisions leave up to five to ten percentage points of margin potential unused. They miss hidden interactions and trade-offs that determine whether an assortment truly performs.
Forward-thinking retailers are adopting systems that combine internal and external data into one logic and deliver ready-to-use recommendations instead of static reports. These tools free up time, reduce error rates, and enable faster, more confident action. Excel still has a place in reporting and quick checks, but it is no longer enough for strategic assortment work.
What category managers gain with Zenline
Zenline is built to support the real work of category managers. Instead of working across multiple files and fragmented dashboards, teams get a unified system that flags where margin is leaking, where product overlaps occur, and where competitor pressure is building.