Forecasting & Inventory Management
Managing Your Inventory Through Status, Communication, and Age
Inventory is the largest balance sheet asset in your business: If your margin is 50%, that means your cost of goods is 50%. In other words, 50% of your net sales are spent on inventory and inbound freight.
So why aren’t merchants more aggressive in dealing with inventory? In particular, marketers need to do more to [...]
Using Initial Customer Order Fill Rate to Measure Customer Service
When you look at all the metrics multichannel companies can use to measure customer service, initial customer order fill rate (ICOFR) is the one that I think is best.
ICOFR is the percentage of orders that are shipped complete—all items that were on the customer order—within your company’s shipping standard. For in-stock product the shipping standard [...]
Registration Has Begun for Online Inventory ShareGroup
With the economy where it is most travel budgets have been cut to a bare bones minimum at most catalog and eCommerce companies. That means that most industry conferences have had a substantial reduction in the number of registrants – even when they give away free VIP passes to attend. We know all too well [...]
Escalate Retail Delivers Landed Cost Capabilities
In a recent press release, Escalate Retail has landed a beta site for its newest release. And it’s the direction the application has taken that will really allow multi channel businesses to reach peak efficiency and profitability. Here is an excerpt and one of the most important pieces of the press release:
San Diego – July [...]
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 and late deliveries for [...]
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 [...]
