Most trading weeks start the same way. Someone opens the weekly report, finds the styles that are running behind, works out what to reorder and what to mark down, and writes it up for the team. It takes a morning. Next Monday it takes a morning again, because nothing about the work was kept.
The morning that repeats
The steps are not hard. Read the week, find the breaks, draft the reorders, summarise for the team. What makes them slow is that a person has to do all of them, in order, every week, before anyone can act on the result.
The decision, written down once
A workflow is those steps written down once: what to read, what counts as a break, what to draft and who it goes to. The judgment is still the merchandiser's. It is made at the start, when the workflow is built, and not repeated by hand every Monday.
An approval, not a task
When the workflow runs, it does the reading and the drafting and then stops. Anything with consequences waits for a person to approve it. The morning becomes a review of a finished proposal, and the merchandiser spends the time deciding and not assembling.