Reduced Out-of-Stock and Attracted Satisfied Customers

Situation

The specific challenge for this $8 billion specialty retailer with 500+ stores was to improve buyer sales projections and reduce the recurrence of out-of-stock items. Frequent stock-outs of promotional items were turning customers off. This also had impact on supply chain and inventory costs.

Approach

Our approach was to work with supply chain, IT, marketing, and merchants to gather item, ad, and category sales data and use this to evaluate performance. We then built a system for reporting performance at the item, category, and department level. We generated actual vs. forecast measures, ROI, and ad lift. We combined sales data for all promoted items with total sales and entire category sales, as well as item pricing, and promotion analysis.

Result

Using a cohesive strategic plan, SafeRock worked successfully across multiple company teams and tiers to build a powerful system that generated highly accurate forecasts, improved buyer planning, and reduced excess inventory.