13 October 2023
The process which I took to complete the Knitwear Range Plan exercise would call upon some reflection. On Wednesday evening after the exercise was assigned, my group mates pretty much had things figured out and we were almost complete. But then, I spent the entire evening at school trying to understand how the store level budget was decided. I reworked the calculation example provided by Julie in the morning lecture, understood the process, and tried to work out the math for Sarah’s exercise. Perhaps it was the lack of sleep that hindered my ability to think clearly. I knew it was a simple calculation but just couldn’t make sense of it for the longest time. My question was: how was the budget % by grade decided? Eventually at around 11pm when all the math finally worked out, I realized budget was probably just set based on sales and traffic data.
The next day, while sitting with another group of classmates and accompanying them in their attempts at the Range Plan, I began to question: how do we adhere to grade level budgets during our purchase plan? Wouldn’t we need to figure out how many units go to each store level? I then proceeded to spend hours laying out the distribution plan by grade by store. Eventually, I figured that out too.
However, this entire process was almost unnecessary. My group had essentially completed the exercise. I did end up correcting some of the numbers so that it would adhere to budget better, but the main point of the exercise was simply to choose the styles and justify quantities purchased. It was never a calculation exercise. It was simply the fact that I was bothered by not making sense of the calculation and distribution behind it. Perhaps that was not a great use of time. I was advised to email the professor to get my questions answered. However, I felt so strongly that it was a simple calculation and that I should be able to figure it out myself, that I insisted in spending that time to figure things out for myself.
I think the moral of this story is that I should be mindful of how much time I’m investing into matters, whether that is truly beneficial to my learning, and how I can expedite that process to avoid future occurrences.