Why Out-of-stocks, Data Mismatch, and Hidden Demand Still Catch Out Beauty Brands When beauty brands review retail performance, the picture often looks reassuring. Availability appears high. Sales reports feel complete. Forecasts are built on what was sold. But our conversations with brands working directly with Ulta and Sephora reveal a more complicated reality. One where... Read more »
Lowe’s reported a 13% increase in earnings for the fiscal fourth quarter and same store sales were up 3.4%. The second largest home improvement retailer has been closing stores and reshaping its operations in an effort to increase profits and compete with rival Home Depot. For 2012, Lowe’s forecasts a total sales increase of… Read more »
Hedge fund manager Edward Lampert announced Thursday he intends to sell off some 1,200 Sears stores in an effort to raise $770 million in cash. Some are looking at this as the start of a breakup and a reversal on the past seven years spent trying to integrate Kmart and pull the company out of… Read more »
Is it just me or does the economy seem to be inching back? Retail sales are rising and are significantly up from the recessionary lows. See details at retailingtoday.com article “U.S. retail sales rise a solid 0.4% in January”. We have also noticed an increase in the number of new customers signing up for… Read more »
After crunching the numbers, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) has found that January 2012 was the fourth warmest January on record across the contiguous United States. This is also the mildest January since 2006, which was the warmest in records dating back to 1895. States with a top 10 warmest January (9 total) –… Read more »
Getting your buyer to agree to push order recommendations, modular changes, SKU assortment changes, etc can be a challenge. Here is some practical experience on how to make it happen. Running a test with your buyer can be a very effective way to ‘sell them’ on new ideas. Many times our clients want to use… Read more »
Frequently Asked Questions Vendors are working hard to understand how to best use retail POS and inventory data, which is made available via EDI 852 or a web portal. Here are five very common questions vendors ask as they work with our team to put a data analysis solution in place. What is the difference… Read more »
When vendors think about managing inventory, quite often they immediately think of those stores with insufficient inventory and how to resolve that. Of course, this is a natural and valuable consideration, and a correspondingly considerable effort is made to eliminate inventory outages and prevent lost sales. But what of the flip side of that coin? … Read more »
The demand driven supply chain is a retail optimization model developed and made popular by AMR Research. AMR defines DDSN as a system of technologies and processes that sense and react to real-time demand across a network of customers, suppliers, and employees. AMR benchmark research shows that those who do not implement supply chain improvement… Read more »
The Accelerated Analytics® service provides category managers with a robust tool for analyzing sales and inventory at a store level. Not only for the current week, but also for all the weeks of selling in the database. Armed with this data, the category manager can very effectively identify slow moving items and stock-out’s on a… Read more »
The efficient consumer response (ECR) movement effectively began in the mid-nineties and was characterized by the emergence of new principles of collaborative management along the supply chain. The underlying premise was that by collaborating with trading partners, the supply chain could become more efficient, eliminate excess inventory, and ultimately provide a more efficient response to… Read more »
