Our clients have told us that forecasting and replenishment have become more important than ever. The entire supply chain must keep inventory lean while doing what they can to quickly identify and support winning items with back up inventory. The margin of error is narrower than ever due to tight credit and shrinking margins.
We have responded in kind by beefing up an already rich feature set of our flagship enterprise software package, Desktop Analyst (DA).
DA enables manufacturers to manage their own lines at the retail level; and track their products through their entire retail lives. In a few simple steps, this software provides in-depth reporting at various merchandise levels including an individual SKU's inventory, sales and projections - down to door level.
Amongst the scores of new features in our latest release, we have added or enhanced tools to provide the user a greater level of automation, flexibility and detail in projecting estimated sales and inventory needs by month. Inventory needs are automatically adjusted as the user updates lead-time and production availability. We added the ability to import wholesale available to ship (shelf stock), and future on order (work in process) as well as the side by side comparison with the retailer's sales forecast. Exception Reporting summarizes the immediate needs, variation from the target inventory model, current weeks on hand and sales projections over various time frames.
While this new functionality is designed to be applicable to all retailers, we made sure it works especially well with Bed Bath and Beyond's new vendor collaborative forecasting initiative.
For Replenishment we added an additional calculation method - Average weekly sales and Target Weeks On Hand. This method allows the user to calculate the inventory needed to meet a target week's on hand model based on average weekly sales.
Our retail sales analysis tools now offer quick access to more Key Performance Indicators such as:
- Age, average weekly sales (units and dollars), weeks on hand, week's Gross Profit %, year to date Gross Profit % and number of stores.
- The last eight weeks sales units and dollars, year to date sales units and dollars as well as the current on hand and sell through.
- Comparison of this year's sales units and dollars, on hand, sell through and number of stores to the same SKU's from last year.
Whether you use a tool like ours or try to do this in spreadsheet or database software, we encourage you to keep a close ear to your buyers' needs and adjust accordingly.
Jim Lewis
Founder and CEO
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