Published on: November 20, 2013
by Randy Fields, Bruce Christiansen and Sage HornerHaving visibility to product movements throughout the extended supply chain enables retailers and suppliers to enhance the shopping experience while creating sales lift. That may seem obvious, so to see how visibility increases in-stock positions and reduces inventories and the number of days of supply, here’s a revealing story of how one company saw the light (please pardon the puns).
A leading supermarket retailer, a leading innovator in the deployment of data management and analytics tools, operates in an extremely competitive environment and has found information technology is a critical factor in gaining an edge. The retailer wanted to give corporate decision makers added functionality in demand forecasting, inventory management and assortment optimization, while increasing the speed of responses for all of the inventory activities.
Three years ago, the retailer implemented a comprehensive solution using a sophisticated web-based system that sets optimal inventory policies for more than 4,000 grocery items sourced from about 200 vendors. As a result, warehouse inventories were reduced significantly, saving millions in carrying costs across the grocery, dairy, frozen, GM and HBC departments while at the same time maintaining a 98% service level on priority items. Along with a decrease of 100,000 cases in the retailer’s distribution centers (from 180,000 cases of safety stock to 80,000 cases) days of supply decreased from 17.6 to 12.4 –an incredible 55% reduction.
The retailer now plans to expand the initiative to additional categories, including deli, cheese, prepared foods, bakery, frozen meat and frozen seafood to experience further savings while reviewing new opportunities to leverage POS data to make additional improvements in their supply chain.
Park City Group provides robust, collaborative supply chain, merchandising and store level solutions for both retailers and suppliers that increase sales, improve operational efficiencies, such as shelf replenishment and merchandising, optimize inventory and reduce out-of-stocks. Our innovative solutions provide trading partners a common platform on which they can capture, manage, analyze and share critical data, bringing greater visibility throughout the supply chain, and giving them the power to make better and more informed decisions.
Next time we’ll review the issues that keep executives up at night. In the meantime, we’re interested in your feedback, so feel free to contact us today. We’ll listen to your challenges and then help you develop and execute a plan to
Sell More, Stock Less and See Everything:
Email us at sales@parkcitygroup.com, or call (435) 645-2205.