C.A.R.M. Studio — Category Advisor Relay Management Studio

Unlock the potential of Blue Yonder’s Space Planning

Space Planning is where planograms get drawn. C.A.R.M. Studio is where the rest of the relay happens: the data, the schedules, the alignments, the automation, and the thousands of planogram edits you should not have to make one at a time. Multi-retailer from the ground up — every retailer’s entire world, completely its own.

Relay Management

Create and schedule relays, assign tasks, and track progress in grids and Gantt charts. Every relay carries its own store alignments, product library, assortments, templates, and drawing folders.

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Category Resources

Project settings, store alignments, products, warehouse availability, feature requirements, assortments, images, and sales history — organized per category, in one place, shared by every relay.

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Stores, Warehouses & Markets

Stores with features and demographics, warehouses with product and planogram associations, markets with regions and areas — imported in bulk, geocoded, and mapped.

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Import Everything

Planograms, products, performance, fixtures, positions, drawings, stores, warehouses, alignments, markets. Spreadsheets or tab-separated files, matched on the columns you choose. Build a product library just by importing planograms.

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Bulk Editing

Edit planogram, position, fixture, performance, and drawing data across thousands of planograms at once — with field-transfer templates, fixture targeting by type, name, and shelf location, and value-aware renaming.

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Automation Tools

Build mods from templates by the thousand, populate performance from sales, insert and delete products with intelligent gap-filling, swap products by list, and balance facings to days-supply and case-pack targets.

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Reporting & Data Extraction

Pull any planogram, product, position, or performance data into Excel — grouped, aggregated, filtered, and formula-calculated — from the database or straight from .psa files. Plus custom report definitions you can save and share.

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Custom Export

Named export configurations shape every planogram to each retailer’s spec — field mappings, calculated fields, custom data, encodings, grouping into folders or projects, even PDF printouts. Thousands of planograms, exported in seconds.

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Work Offline

Check planograms out and take them with you — to a retailer meeting or the road. The same familiar menus and tools work offline, and check-in takes seconds when you reconnect.

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Built on SQL Server

All of your data lives in a standard SQL Server database — not a proprietary black box. Connect your own BI and reporting tools, integrate with the systems you already run, and keep full ownership of your data. And when a planogram needs quick attention outside a relay, the Folder Browser works straight across your file system — local or network — allowing you to work with .psa files directly. Combined with C.A.R.M. Studio’s Space Planning–compatible product library exports, you can work entirely in files, even adding products from a familiar Product Library.

Feature Breakout

Relays, Templates & the Mod Builder

A relay is more than a due date. Each one carries its own store alignments, product library, assortments, and planogram templates — so this season’s work never contaminates last season’s history.

Relay planning in progress
  • Create relays, add tasks, and track progress — per relay or across every company and category in one customizable grid
  • Gantt chart views of relay schedules and task progress
  • Relay-specific store, warehouse, trait, and cluster alignments
  • Relay product libraries copied from the category on association — frozen from future category changes
  • Mod Builder: build new mods from templates, or update existing mods from templates — properties, segments, fixtures, drawings, objects, and positions, with merge-or-replace position handling
  • Drawing folders organize the relay’s planograms; find any store’s planogram with Ctrl+Shift+F

Planogram Operations

Everything between “the file exists” and “the relay shipped.” Locking keeps multiple advisors out of each other’s way, and bulk operations are fast even on thousands of planograms.

Perfectly faced supermarket aisle at scale
  • Open planograms individually or grouped as projects — without project openings polluting performance records on check-in
  • Check-out locking with visible lock owner, plus unlock and bulk check-in
  • Copy, clone, move, and delete in bulk — fast
  • Mirror planograms individually or in bulk
  • Recalculate planograms in bulk — refresh every calculated field across a folder in one pass
  • Balance: fill combined linear space with priority to case-pack-out, then days-supply, with faceout distribution, overfill options, target starting DOS, markdown handling, and per-fixture, per-position, and per-facing padding
  • Edit any planogram or position field — individually or in bulk, with field transfers like typing [Desc1] into Name
  • Export with duplicate-name detection, encoding preservation (ANSI, UTF-8, UTF-16LE), grouping into folders or projects, PDF printouts via layout files, and OLE embedded object support
  • Summary tabs on every planogram grid: store assignments, warehouse association, merch summary, considerations, adds, deletes, under-DOS, under-CPO (with the Space Planning inventory-model hierarchy honored and sourced), and an interactive sales chart — dissect by nearly any product field, summed or averaged, top or bottom 10/20/30, and jump straight to the sales editor

Products, Assortments & Images

A real product library — every field you see in Space Planning and more — that your whole team and every tool in the application draws from.

Organized archive of labeled category bins
  • Import products from Excel, from Space Planning libraries, or straight off the planograms you already have
  • Edit every product field; clone products; export to a shareable backup format or to Space Planning’s own product library format
  • Per-product, per-fixture-type position default settings — automation tools honor them when creating new positions
  • Warehouse associations restrict products to the stores that can actually stock them
  • Store feature requirements (has a fryer, has a dock, high-demographic…) gate placement by store capability
  • Component products: model items that are sold as parts of other items
  • Named assortments feed the automation tools — limit advisor shelves or inserts to an assortment
  • Category image libraries with subscriptions: real thumbnails for files Explorer can't preview, automatic downloads of new and updated images, and Space Planning automatically pointed at the managed folder

Stores, Warehouses, Alignments & Markets

The physical network behind the planograms: which stores exist, what they can do, which warehouse feeds them, and which planogram each one gets.

Distribution center serving a store network
  • Stores with numbers, features, clusters, and demographics — added by hand or imported in bulk
  • Warehouses associated with stores, products, and planograms
  • Store alignment to warehouse, trait, cluster, and planogram — add, edit, or import; category-level and relay-level
  • Market management with regions and areas, including importers for all three
  • Geocode addresses to latitude and longitude, and map stores, warehouses, and their associations

Automation & Advisor Tools

The tools that turn a week of clicking into minutes of review. Every one of them respects warehouse associations, feature requirements, and your product settings.

Automated warehouse machinery in motion
  • Advisor Shelves: working shelves generated onto mods — Add, Delete, Cutdown, Consideration, Components, and Special Products shelves, each with configurable sorting and colors, optionally limited to assortments
  • Performance Populator: build planogram performance straight from company sales history — weighted averages, averages, and min/max ranges; standard fields on one period, custom fields on their own range with selectable match levels, and six per-category period ranges filling SalesP1–6, UnitsP1–6, and ProfitP1–6; the level of match used is recorded (MOD, cluster, warehouse, market, region, area, or national)
  • Bulk insert: place a product across planograms with anchor products, fixture targeting, multiple-position rules, validity checks, and optional automatic balancing of the affected fixture
  • Position delete: remove products and control the gap — leave it, fill exactly, fill plus a margin, or rebalance the combined fixture, pulling replacements from the consideration shelf or a product list you specify
  • Bulk swaps: build swap lists in a UI or import them, scoped by warehouse association or trait
  • Remove invalid positions, invalid performance, and unallocated records across whole folders
  • Merge and split positions: combine a product’s positions or split them apart, targeted by product, fixture type, and shelf location
  • Drawing Manager: every drawing across the selected planograms in one grid — identical drawings grouped with a count, edit one row to change it on every planogram it appears on, merge same-type drawings, delete in bulk; plus add, import, export, and targeted bulk-delete by type, name, text, or location

Performance & Sales

Sales history lives with the category. Performance flows from it — and back out of it — on your terms.

Dollar-sign paperweight in front of glowing performance charts
  • Store historical sales data per category; view trends in charts; edit or delete history directly — imports run at tens of thousands of records per second
  • Generate planogram performance from sales — weighted averages, min/max ranges, six per-category comparison periods, standard and custom field ranges, with the match level recorded
  • Performance Editor: edit performance records across all selected planograms in one grid
  • Import and export performance in bulk — matched by keys, planogram fields, store alignment, or broadcast to every record for a product
  • Ignores project-opening performance pollution on check-in, so shared product data never fabricates history

Reporting, Extraction & Custom Export

Your data is only as good as your ability to get it back out. C.A.R.M. Studio treats extraction as a first-class feature.

Desk with printed charts and a planogram printout
  • Planogram Data Extractor: select any planogram, project, product, position, performance, or fixture fields and pull them to Excel — from the database or directly from .psa files
  • Grouped reports pivot multiple planogram sets side by side — past, present, and future mods in one row per product
  • Aggregates (sum, average, min, max, count), group-by, per-column criteria, Excel-style format strings, and formula columns computed at extract time
  • Save and load extractor report definitions; run saved custom reports (.ccr) against any folder
  • Add/Delete and Store Item List reports across nodes, relays, and categories with selectable keys (UPC, ID, UPC+ID, StandardCode)
  • Every grid in the application exports exactly as you see it — filters, groups, and formatting included
  • Custom Export configurations: named, per-retailer property mappings with dynamic parent-object values, calculated fields, C.A.R.M. Studio or original custom data, and unallocated handling

Fit, Finish & Platform

The unglamorous details that decide whether a tool is livable eight hours a day.

Precision tools nested in fitted foam
  • 25 themes, including options designed for light sensitivity
  • Grid Settings Manager: pin, sort, group, format, mask, conditional appearance formulas, summaries, custom columns, and shareable settings files — on virtually every grid
  • Standard hotkeys everywhere: Ctrl+F find, Ctrl+G find column, Ctrl+Shift+F find store, and dozens more
  • Automatic updates checked at startup and on demand (and they can be disabled)
  • Adjustable logging from high-level status to granular debug
  • Deep Space Planning integration: launch it, save-and-close everything open in it, restore its window to your active screen, and keep its INI and registry settings healthy automatically
  • Runs alongside the Space Planning license you already have — C.A.R.M. Studio manages the data and the workflow; Space Planning stays your drawing surface

Built by Advisors, for Advisors

C.A.R.M. Studio was not designed in a conference room. It grew out of years of running real relays — the late nights before reset day, the retailer who needs their export formatted their way, the property change across thousands of planograms that should not take a week.

Every feature on this page exists because a category advisor needed it. That is the whole roadmap: the actual work, made faster.