In the Press
Over the last three years, Retail Solutions has been one of the most innovative companies in the CPG space. Retail Solutions' solutions have brought new levels of depth to the way CPG companies understand their customers and what all parties, retailers, manufacturers and merchandisers can do in near-real time.
-Kara Romanow, Executive Editor, Consumer Goods Technology Magazine
Supply Chain Solutions
End of Life's and Package Transitions
Product launches and re-launches often have unwanted consequences for the supply chain organization. In an environment where product lifecycles accelerate and where product innovation is critical to drive customer acquisition and retention, both retailers and CPG companies must organize to ensure they are not stuck with products no longer belonging to the most current assortment, driving up reclaims and reverse supply chain expenses.
In a structured plan to drive effective product transitions and re-launches, real-time visibility on inventory and sales at the store level is a must-have to ensure that supply remains uninterrupted while inventory is kept at the optimal level throughout the process - and down to zero at the right time.
Retail Solutions customers leverage downstream data to monitor and manage inventory levels, adjust markdown policies to drive sales of discontinued products and get rid of excess inventory to enable effective assortment transitions. Some of Retail Solutions use cases include:
- End-of-life and phase-out management
- Package transition management
Retail Solutions customers manage each transition and re-launch more effectively and more efficiently:
- Manage the optimal pricing, markdown and merchandising strategies at the store-item combination level to optimize sales velocity while protecting margin and avoiding returns
- Ensure that discontinued products are replenished right until the new product codes are being activated, to avoid costly out-of-stocks hurting both sales and customer loyalty
- Monitor product discontinuations to ensure the right products (and not the discontinued ones) are sold in the right stores
Retail Solutions provides its customers with an extensive set of templates to automate the management of discontinued products and package transitions through a powerful management by exception framework.
- Provides a logical decision making framework to drive inventory, replenishment and markdown decisions in real-time down to the store-SKU level
- Automatically flags store-SKU-level issues (excess or low inventory, replenishment issues, early launches...) to enable quick resolution
- Refreshes in real-time to ensure decisions are taken on most recent data - all the way through the final transition
- Integrates to store operations and merchandising handheld and activity scheduling systems to guarantee actionability of the alerts