Featured Customer
Their [Retail Solutions] algorithm was outperforming ours. We tested theirs against ours and found that their system was detecting 5-8X more OOS conditions than we were getting from our algorithm.
-J.P. Brackman, Global Retail Presence Manager, The Procter & Gamble Company
Supply Chain Solutions
Out-of-Stocks
One of the most quoted statistics in the industry is also the one that has shown the most resilience and stability over the years. Out-of-stock levels have been hovering around 8% for the last 10 years, and tend to double during promotional periods.
The industry's inability to effectively address this problem can be traced back to the difficulty to accurately identify and respond to out-of-stock situations in near-real time. When is a sales drop or a no-scan a real out-of-stock situation rather than a temporary drop in customer demand? What is the real root cause of a particular out-of-stock (store execution vs. phantom inventory vs. replenishment parameters vs. upstream issue)?
Retail Solutions customers leverage downstream data to identify and correct out-of-stocks situations in near-real time. Retail Solutions' unique and proprietary approach to on-shelf availability is based on powerful algorithms researched and developed in partnership with some of the largest CPG companies in the industry. Some of Retail Solutions use cases for out-of-stocks include:
- Phantom inventory identification and correction
- Shelf-out-of-stock identification and correction
- Distribution void identification and correction
- Replenishment out-of-stock identification and correction
In times of increased competition driven by assortment rationalization and the fast growth of private label products, Retail Solutions customers grow sales, earn above-average customer loyalty and build lasting competitive advantage by providing better on-shelf availability than their peers.
- Avoid lost sales by identifying and correcting real out-of-stock situations faster and more accurately
- Avoid the recurrence of out-of-stocks by fixing their root causes rather than simply focusing on solving them once... and awaiting the next issue
- Leverage in-store resources more effectively by focusing them on the real costly availability issues rather than randomly check store shelves
Retail Solutions out-of-stock offerings enable CPG companies to catch more out-of-stocks and to identify them earlier than traditional sales- or inventory-based methods such as zero-scans or zero-inventory alerts.
- Accurately identifies the root cause of out-of-stocks to ensure you can fix the causes rather than the manifestations
- Automatically corrects the inherent flaws of Computer-Generated Ordering (CGO) solutions
- Fixes the phantom inventory affecting replenishment thresholds
- Adjusts order recommendations to reflect real customer demand rather than average sales, which may have been lowered by prior out-of-stocks
- Helps drive store interventions
- Hierarchizes alerts based on the potential to recover sales, to focus in-store resources on the highest value interventions
- Integrates to store operations and merchandising handheld and activity scheduling systems to guarantee actionability of the alerts