Featured Customer
We tried to build an internal solution using a standard database tool, but it simply did not work. Not only did we struggle with scalability issues, but we also needed to cleanse and load the data ourselves, and we discovered it certainly was not trivial.[...] Going with Retail Solutions was the logical decision.
-Gary Hall,
Business Analyst,
Kimberly-Clark
POS-Based Applications
Intelligent Zero-Scans
Year after year, in every survey, out-of-stock rates continue to hover around 8%, with spikes at 16% during promotions. As assortments get more and more complex and as both retailers and suppliers face an increasing shortage of store labor, fixing these issues by monitoring each product is fast becoming unrealistic.
Traditional mechanisms to identify out-of-stocks track the number of days of no-sales based on average sales velocity. This method fails to consider rapidly changing consumer demand patterns or the impact of external factors, such as the weather. Similarly, inventory-based methods do not take into account the fact that store execution is imperfect and that products often are left in the back of the store.
Retail Solutions customers leverage Intelligent Zero-Scans to accurately identify shelf out-of-stocks at the shelf. Leveraging downstream data, Retail Solutions proprietary algorithms monitor data for statistically significant sales gaps or sales drops for each store-SKU combination in comparison to other retailer stores.
This approach enables Retail Solutions customers to identify out-of-stock situations faster to correct them and to understand the true out-of-stock rate, by SKU and by store to trigger the appropriate strategic response (planogram changes, replenishment practices...)
Using Retail Solutions, industry leaders capture out-of-stock faster and more accurately than their competitors.
- Avoid lost sales
- Identify out-of-stocks earlier than the traditional no-sales method and more accurately than the inventory-based technique
- Avoid the false-positives created by the traditional methods (products left in the back for inventory-based technique, no-sales while the product is still on the shelf due to lower consumer demand)
- Gain a true understanding of out-of-stocks by product, by location and by day to create the foundation of a fact-based dialog between the retailer and the supplier
Intelligent Zero-Scans provides CPG companies with a full tool to monitor, correct and avoid out-of-stocks at the shelf.
- Completely automated solution, producing both individual alerts and overall scorecard
- Hierarchization of alerts by potential lost sales within a store to ensure store resources address the most costly issues first
- Comprehensive alert integration into handheld devices, email infrastructure or portals
- Full feedback loop, including product condition and shelf tag condition, to monitor the root cause of out-of-stocks