Sending Articles to Stores

I am searching for a better way to send down our assortments to the stores.  Currently we are using the Assortment List Type and have it set to a lead time of 1 and cycle of 1 with 30000 on the number of changes.  We played with this setting to see if we can send our articles down 3 or 5 days in advance, however when we set the lead time to 3 or 5 then Retail cannot make changes on the fly and send pricing down to the stores the next day.  This is a problem.  I am seeking advice on how we can send articles down to the stores using a different way so that it goes several days in advance, but is activated on the specified day set by the merchandiser in VKP5 (also seen in VKP2).  Part of the issue is that some of the stores are not getting the pricing in a timely way due to the connection or etc.  If we can send the pricing down several days in advance without the system resetting the active date that would be great.  If you have any insight on this, with SPRO configuration, I would be very interested.