By Al Heller, staff writer CPG Matters

Not too long ago, Howard Products was at great risk of impeded sales, turns and category share at its biggest client, a major home improvement chain. The California-based maker of specialty wood care products lacked the technology to easily access and analyze weekly updates of unit sales and on-hand inventory in each store, which the retailer made available (852 POS data sent through EDI).

“We couldn’t even identify out of stocks, let alone resolve them,” said Steven Pugh, vice president, who was getting ready for a national rollout of new line of Howard products. What to do?

Although the chain didn’t mandate such support, Howard felt new software would be critical to success. The stakes were higher, and Excel wasn’t enough anymore, in his opinion. When Pugh deployed the latest sophisticated analytics software, the findings were stunning: over 50% of the stores it had just rolled into had zero inventory on hand.

“Units had sold through, but weren’t replenished,” he said. “Many of the individual stores didn’t reorder. Perhaps their staff thought we were on auto-replenishment, but there were holes on the shelves where our products should have been,” Pugh explained. “This was about to translate into zero sales in subsequent weeks and create a downward spiral even though we were selling through.”

Since Howard identified both the problem and solution before the chain did, the buyer reacted positively and instituted a blanket order for all stores that resolved the issue. Howard also directed its contracted field force staff to re-educate store-level personnel about the importance of reordering product. “Without the software, I’d have had to call each store individually to learn inventory status, and that would have been impossible,” recalled Pugh. “I was up and running within less than a month.”

Going forward, Howard is able to share with the chain click-through reports using a versatile dashboard. “Templates make it easier to manage our supply chain. We can show, for example, a summary of the past eight weeks, or year to date, by SKU, by region, or overall,” noted Pugh. “We can export to Excel and send the chain buyer reports for his top 20 stores for our product sales, or even the top 20 stores within specific regions.”

Since the software provider, Akron, Ohio-based Rainmaker Group, hosts the Accelerated Analytics program on its own servers, “our national sales manager can see everything I see from wherever he is,” added Pugh. Moving ahead, “we’ve already added weekly order information from our in-house ERP system. The software application was able to seamlessly integrate it with the 852 data, along with store names, markets and regional information. We’ll definitely be adding retailers and expanding the number of users to leverage the power."

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