Inventory Management
How Do I Develop a Liquidation Strategy for Slow Selling Products?
Problems: Inventory is the largest single balance sheet asset in most e-commerce businesses, but around 80% of sales are typically generated by about 20% of products—and more than 50% of products often either do not meet, or exceed, their burden in terms of contribution to profit. Many centers have significant space occupied by slow selling [...]
How Can I Improve My Gross Margin?
Problems: Inbound freight cost as a percent of gross sales is 2% to 4% for domestic and 6% to 12% for imported product. These costs are not only eating company profit, but as a component of the cost of goods sold on your P&L, inbound freight is reducing gross margin and causing companies to charge [...]
How Do I Develop and Implement a Vendor Compliance Program?
Problems: When vendors don’t deliver on time, it means lost sales and/or back order costs that for most businesses range from $7 to $12 per unit of product. When vendors don’t conform to routing guides, it increases freight costs. A lack of standards can cause receipts to back up in receiving and put away, and [...]
What Are Typical Vendor Compliance Policies that I Should Include?
So you have made a decision to move forward to develop and implement a vendor compliance program. You have an idea of what should be included into the manual to send to your vendors, but your not quite sure that you have all of the right sections. We have developed the following compiled list of sections from dozens of [...]
What are Typical Vendor Charge Backs?
In developing dozens of vendor compliance manuals, we have seen a wide variety of items, categories, and lists of vendor charge backs. We feel like with a new compliance program, you should include the following, to start with: Shipment did not conform to routing guide Early shipment without approval Improper PO# on carton Product substitution [...]
Take a Financial View of Inventory
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 [...]
Trends in Warehouse Benchmarking Metrics
Over the past 26 years, F. Curtis Barry & Company has had the fortunate opportunity to have hundreds of warehouse clients in the catalog and eCommerce industry. One question that comes up in almost every project is how do we rank when it comes to productivity and efficiency. See for yourself how you stack up: Cost [...]
Where Should Inventory Management Report In Your Organization?
As we do comprehensive inventory management assessments, often the issue surfaces as to where the function should report? Traditionally, inventory planning, forecasting and management functions have reported to the Merchants. But products assortments and businesses became more complex and diversified management often asks should it report to Operations or Finance? The rationale is that the [...]
How USI Laminate Turned Back the Clock on Aging Inventory with Manage Metrix
Summary In only a few months, USI has used Manage Metrix to significantly drive down aged inventory, pro-actively liquidate non-productive stock, quantify vendor delivery performance, reduce orders for items that are not needed and understand trends in product performance and inventory. And as a result, the company is able to, “detect issues before they become [...]
How are you measuring your eCommerce promotions’ advertising and breakeven?
Historically, the catalog industry has measured the response rate for various promotions, the advertising cost of the promotion and its breakeven based on demand, product cost etc. Along comes the eCommerce world and many of the new promotional methods (such as email, affiliate programs, etc.) are apparently not being measured. At the same time, companies [...]
