The value of reviewing daily and weekly POS and inventory data is well understood by a large number of vendors these days. Many have dedicated staff and home grown tools to accomplishing this important function. In fact, many vendors we speak with have dozens of hours invested each week into this project. And the number of hours is growing rapidly. As we begin to break down the time and effort involved we most often find 80% of time is spent fetching and manipulating data and 20% is spent analyzing, reporting and taking action. Unfortunately, the grunt work of handling data is a large task and it's multiplied for each of your retail customers. The most valuable information, like sell-thru for each item at each store, is also the most time consuming to analyze. If your working with a larger retailer like Wal-Mart, CVS, JC Penney, or Home Depot it can be somewhat overwhelming without the right tools.

Some retailers like Wal-Mart and JC Penney are making very rich sets of data available through their web portals. But the vendors we talk to are swamped by the time consuming effort to export this data, load it into Excel or Access and then begin the process of building reports. Once reports are built then comes the time consuming effort of reviewing the data store by store and item by item to find the issues and opportunities. For many vendors this process consumes staff time and is not timely enough for decision making by the time its completed.

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