Company

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Industry

Retail

Solution name:

Operational, supply chain, sales and promotion performance

Pain Description

A Lack of Visibility
Based in the U.K., this company’s 230 retail stores provide a range of clothing for mothers-to-be, babies and pre-school children, together with home and travel products and toys. For a retail operation of this size, one of the keys to success is the ability to track and monitor inventory and sales performance from the buying stage, through to merchandising and replenishment. However, the company’s ability to do this effectively was hampered because each department maintained its own information in disparate legacy systems and there was no way to get a comprehensive view of product performance from the warehouse to the customer.

Buyers Working with Inadequate Information
At this company, the buyers’ role is to understand how well products are selling and determine if more are required and, based on this information, also decide what products should be brought in for the next season. To do this, they need to know, down to the SKU level, how many units are still in stores, and how many are in the warehouses. But with all of this data in separate, aging systems ― systems that could only be accessed by central IT staff ― the buyers were often purchasing products by guesswork rather than fact. The result: money wasted by overstocking some items and lost revenue when best-sellers were out of stock.

Store Merchandisers Working by Guesswork
Based on a variety of factors ― such as past sales, emerging trends or regional differences ― merchandisers decide what range of products should be presented to which customers and stores at what time. But, once again lacking the ability to look at sales in each store down to the SKU level, merchandisers at the company had to plan each store’s inventory more by guesswork than by actual numbers. This made it much harder to have the right items in the right store at the right time, leading to lost sales and, if the store seems out of touch with trends, a diminishment of the brand.

Difficulty Keeping Top-Selling Items in Stock
A critical part of the supply chain, replenishers work to make sure the actual products, as directed by merchandisers, get to the stores and remain in stock once they arrive. Based on point-of-sale information, fresh stock is automatically sent to stores, but since this information was not available down to SKU level and not available as quickly as it should be, it was difficult to track inventory and determine how to keep top selling items in stock. When in-demand items are out of stock the result is yet another situation resulting in lost customers and lost revenue.

Pain Highlights:
  • Disparate legacy systems cause a lack of visibility into all parts of the supply chain
  • Buyers can’t plan accurately without more accurate and detailed sales information
  • Merchandisers need better data to accurately plan store inventories
  • Inability to track top selling products and ensure they are always in stock
Solution Description

Real-time Sales Data Eliminate Guesswork
Using Panorama NovaView in conjunction with a new central data warehouse provides the company with a consistent single view of sales data for all user groups, and supports the quick and accurate production of consolidated reports. This new, near real-time visibility allows such critical areas as buying, merchandising, replenishing and marketing to be more reactive and make business decisions based on actual information instead of guesstimates or even out-and-out guesses.

Better Buying Practices Protect the Bottom Line
Using Panorama NovaView to view data reported to the central data warehouse by each department, buyers can now look at a product’s performance and see exactly how many have been sold, how many are in stores and how many are in the warehouse. This allows them to more accurately predict how many more they need to buy and when they will need them. This helps eliminate wasted resources due to overstocking and prevents the lost revenue that results when popular items are out of stock, leading to a more efficient and reactive organization from warehouse to customer.

Getting the Right Stock in the Right Stores
When Panorama NovaView is combined with the company’s POS software that reports what’s been sold each day, merchandisers have an actual view ― at whatever level they want ― of what’s going on in the stores. Seeing how well an item has sold ― across the company, in a region or at a particular store ― gives merchandisers the hard data they need to anticipate trends and plan what range of products should be presented to which customers and stores at what time. So when the customers find what they want, when they want it, they spend their money at the company’s stores.

Keeping Hot Sellers in the Stores
The company’s replenishment system is set up so that when a store is selling products it is automatically sent more stock if it meets certain criteria. Based on views from Panorama of what stock is where in the supply chain, analysts can check and tweak the formulae that control the automatic restocking. In fact, since implementing Panorama NovaView, the company tracks the “availability” of its top 250 items by comparing quantities that are supposed to be on the floor, versus what is actually there, and this measure has steadily improved. This demonstrates that it has become increasingly more accurate in its inventory tracking and more efficient in restocking best-selling items. The bottom line, once again, is more revenues because when customers find hot-selling items out of stock they don’t spend today, and might not be back tomorrow.

Measure and Improve Performance of Marketing Campaigns
Since quick and accurate sales information was not previously available down to the SKU level, the company’s marketing team could not tell which promotional activity was creating the best sales. But with the increased capability of Panorama NovaView to analyze sales, financial and merchandising staff can report exactly which SKU is generating what money, and which promotion generated the sale. This enables marketers to develop new marketing campaigns, measure the effectives of current initiatives and take the necessary steps to keep sales strong.

Solution Highlights:
  • Track trends and performance across the organization
  • Increase efficiency in inventory tracking and buying strategy
  • Predict trends and keep top-sellers in stock with accurate, near real-time sales data
  • Improve efficiency and accuracy in restocking supply chain
  • Track and improve performance of marketing campaigns

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