Why does the replenishment process fail?
Isn’t it a poor experience when your favourite store runs out of stock of your favourite product? That is exactly how all customers feel when their most-trusted retail chain has no stock of their desired product. Leaving a bitter impression on these customers could lead to losing their business forever. On the contrary, excessive stock results in blocked resources and high costs for maintenance. Retailers incur huge losses in either of the cases. This makes replenishment as one of the most crucial aspects in the retail business.
There are a few reasons for retail businesses to be unable to set up the replenishment process right. Read on to learn about these reasons.
1. Poorly maintained data
Data is the most crucial factor for setting up an accurate replenishment process. Retailers need to track inventory movement, product shelf life, product lifetime, sales trends, sales during promotions, and much more. With zero or minimum maintenance of all this data, retailers could face various challenges in replenishing stock timely or accurately.
2. Inaccurate demand forecasting
Retailers need to track data for various periods of time - during different seasons, festivals, discounted sales, and the likes. Upon analyzing all the data, they would be able to gauge the demand for various products. The volumes of this data could be very large and tracking, managing, and analyzing all this data could be very complicated. Any inaccuracy in the data would result in inaccurate demand forecasting, thus creating a hindrance for proper replenishment.
3. Inferior vendor management
Retail supply chains procure products from multiple vendors. Mapping correct purchase orders with their vendors, placing replenishment purchase orders on a timely basis, maintaining all records, and the like need to be done absolutely error-free. Imagine the amount of chaos that could be created if incorrect purchase orders are placed with a particular vendor! Not only would that delay the entire replenishment process, but retailers might also incur heavy losses in terms of vendors’ trust, customers’ business, time and resources to put the replenishment purchase orders in place, and the like.
Ginesys offers a comprehensive replenishment module for all kinds of retail businesses - from supermarket chains to apparel and lifestyle brands. It allows retailers to have a proper vendor management system in place and they can set a threshold limit after which the system automatically places purchase orders for product replenishment in their stores.
It is also integrated with the inventory management system. This enables retailers to have a track of all sales in real-time in all stores and across all online and offline channels. This, in turn, helps in better demand forecasting for various seasons, festivals, and other instances.
Also, the module produces accurate analytical reports that assist the organization’s management to take appropriate business decisions and scale up the business.
