Neglecting Lost Sales data in your demand forecasting math lowers forecast accuracy, lowering profits and raising inventory expense.
In this 2-minute video uncover the hidden costs of excluding lost sales from your demand forecasting calculations. Read more
Chinese New Year: Its Coming, Is Your Supply Chain Ready?
Chinese New Year starts on February 8, 2016. Most retailers are familiar with Chinese New Year because every year their Chinese suppliers and factories shut down for a few weeks. Chinese New Year is a huge celebration for China and many surrounding countries. Workers head home for a much deserved vacation that can last 4 weeks or more, leaving quiet offices and empty factories. That means nothing is shipping and that can result in empty shelves or managing the cost of overstocks- if your Inventory Replenishment software bought the right products.
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Lost sales are a perpetual worry for all retailers. If your shelves are empty, customers go home empty-handed, and you won’t make your sales plan. Most replenishment systems and demand forecasting systems offer a lost sales calculation to help retailers manage this key business problem. But is your lost sales calculation actually helping you as much as you thought? Are you still watching sales slip through your fingers and wondering why?
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Demand Driven retail/ wholesale companies stay ahead of the competition by focusing on three key areas in their supply chain. In addition, demand driven retailers and wholesalers know you will resist change and stay focused on sales and gross margin, failing to allow GMROI to impact operating decisions. Demand driven retail / wholesale companies understand you and the competition stay focused on fast profits, growing sales and increased customer counts without reviewing the cost of acquiring those customers or learning why existing customers didn’t spend more due to out of stocks resulting from lost sales. Demand Driven retail / wholesale companies know the things to avoid by watching the competition’s mistakes. Resisting change and staying focused on old business concepts and numbers doesn’t work in the marketplace anymore.
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Sales Forecasting is a measure of the market response; it is not a measure of market demand. However, the problem with this is that simple; the most accurate sales forecast is only a measure of market response to what is available. This is not accurate when considering future market demand. Issues with constrained supply, service levels, price, and promotion are not analyzed correctly. Yet, this is why sales forecasting is responsible for out-of-stock and overstock in many companies.
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A little Demand forecasting mistake costs retailers and wholesalers significant profits each year. While the mistake seems small, in reality, over one year, the total dollars in lost profits will be significant. How? Demand forecasting impacts your largest asset, your inventory. Also, Demand Forecasting is an integral part of many business processes, poor processes cost you money. While the mistake may sound old and obvious, most businesses do not account for this which provides you an opportunity over your competition.
Read moreSeasonal Indexes are a great tool that can be easily used to manage inventory and improve replenishment, allocations and new product releases. Seasonal Indexes used correctly result in sales growth and fewer out-of-stocks. Hello,Captain Obvious. The unfortunate truth is many of you fail to use seasonal indexes where you should today. The small group that does use seasonal indexes often fails to adjust the indexes when calendar events happen in different business fiscal weeks this year compared to the year the index was created. Last, Seasonal Indexes fail when you use the wrong math formula to create the seasonal index or you or your software use the wrong demand sales data to build the seasonal index. The results from these issues are out-of-stocks, lost sales and mis-spent inventory dollars. Read more
The key to successful Demand Driven retail is leveraging the right data in the right places. Lost Sales data has a lot of leverage that, when ignored, can be your demise; however, those that successfully measure and leverage Lost Sales data will see sales and profit gains. Our Lost Sales blog today outlines how lost sales data can be used to improve inventory optimization and highlights how all the pieces are interconnected. We also dive into the differences between lost opportunity and lost sales, the differences and impacts between the two, and close with some sobering statistics from Lost Sales data collected from the industry.
Our first blog on Lost Sales highlighted the staggering impact of Lost Sales in most businesses today. We outlined some of the methods used to calculate lost sales, and why these methods do not deliver value. Our second Lost Sales blog reviewed how lost sales can add value to demand forecasting and improve the accuracy and value for the service attained calculation.
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Our last blog highlighted the staggering impact of Lost Sales in most businesses. We outlined some of the methods used to calculate lost sales, and why these methods do not deliver value. We touched on in-stock and Service Attained as two measures that in the past were acceptable inventory ROI measures but, in the market place today, these methods are dated and focus retail in the wrong direction.
With the advancement of inexpensive hardware, we can calculate a very accurate demand forecast across any block of products in our assortment and measure the business at any individual (or group of) product / locations. We can easily track available inventory for any product/location at a moment’s notice. This makes calculating lost sales a simple calculation: sum demand for the days where available inventory <=0. Today, we will review how lost sales impact demand forecasting, service attained, and inventory optimization.
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