Archive for July, 2009
Does an “All in One” Software Solution Really Exist?
15-20 years ago companies were often times buying most of their software from a single vendor. Order management software vendors were supplying everything – AR, AP and GL modules, manifesting, order entry and customer service, warehousing functions and a full reporting suite. Over time best of breed approaches were becoming more prevalent as niche vendors [...]
Understanding Your Demand Winners
Almost every company that we work with can easily rattle off and name the top 10-20 products with the highest gross sales, or demand winners. But often times these same companies couldn’t tell us which of those items are profit winners. The first guess is usually those core items that they never want to be [...]
What Is Your Inventory Strategy For Christmas 2009?
A few years ago I was in Australia in July and saw a lot of retailers advertising specials for “Christmas in July”; a novel idea as it is winter in the southern hemisphere at this time. Well I have started seeing ads for layaways from Kmart and Hallmark debuting their Christmas ornament collection. U.S. retailers [...]
Internal Scorecards for Merchants and Inventory Buyers
Every day, companies evaluate a merchandise vendor’s performance against goals and their worth to the company through a vendor scorecard, such as: § How many backorders were caused by the vendor? § What are the gross sales for the vendor? § How many RTV’s or defective products for the vendor? § How many early deliveries [...]
10 Principles to Sound Business Intelligence and KPI Application Development
Companies these days are looking for every advantage to compete in this economy, and more and more are turning towards unlocking the secrets hidden in all their data. With so many different applications and databases used in multi channel businesses these days, the task can seem daunting. Developing sophisticated KPI and business intelligence applications are [...]
When Should a Good Inventory Buy Be Avoided?
You might be asking yourself – if it is a good buy, how could it be bad? First, let’s take a look at several aspects. Companies have always been aggressive with squeezing every margin dollar they could, even more so in this economy. And in order to do this many have looked over seas to [...]
Merchandising and cost of backorders
The other day we worked with a mid-sized gift marketer to have them analyze their Spring book and web campaigns from a price range perspective. They had never done this and were surprised to find that 39% of their SKU’s were $25 and under – the average price point in this group was actually $11.15. [...]
Inventory turns and age of inventory
In working with a client the other day, we were analyzing several inventory KPI’s. Their goal was to turn the inventory at least 4 times annually, up from the 3.15 turns they are doing today. We then talked about how long they carried inventory before they deemed it to be “aged” or beginning to get [...]
