JustEnough, a supplier of Demand Forecasting and Demand Planning solutions, released a case study showing how Australian specialty retailer Strandbags is seeing lasting success like reduced markdowns, optimized sales potential and a financial boost.
Strandbags is one of Australia's largest and most successful specialty retailers, operating over 350 stores throughout Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East and South Africa. With thousands of products and styles to satisfy choosy customers, Strandbags' planners lacked store-by-store buying pattern data and other tools to ensure prompt stock replenishment.
Using a blanket ordering approach, the company was re-stocking individual stores but quantities were based mostly on the planning team's speculation about future store performance. This meant that valuable sales opportunities were wasted if the demand exceeded projections.
"There was very little science being applied to store stocking and we could not replenish them quickly," recalls Nathan Toussaint, Business Analyst at Strandbags. "We could not do so because we lacked in-depth analytics. But even if we had analytics, we still needed to decipher the meaning behind the numbers. We couldn't."
Strandbags selected JustEnough to do just that. Using JustEnough's Demand Forecasting and Inventory Planning solutions, each item's stocked stores are now analyzed and ranked so that limited items are sent to the stores most likely to sell them. Faster-selling SKUs are proactively restocked and slower moving items are reactively replenished.
Even a year later, on-site retail managers are confident, knowing that when they see a particular item is selling briskly at their store it will be replenished quickly.
By sharing JustEnough's AgainstWaste philosophy, Strandbags continues to have less inventory that goes to waste. Plus, there are less wasted opportunities because StrandBags now delivers highly sought-after products right down to the store SKU level and far more quickly than before.
This effort helped Strandbags reduce its markdowns, resulting in a financial boost for the company, Toussaint says.
"Stores are amazed that their deliveries include more of the products they see selling well," Toussaint explains. "It's the only software that can tell us exactly what and how much stock was in the stores, thus ensuring our display quantities and safety stock are at correct levels."
Download the case study at http://www.justenough.com/Snapshot_Strandbags.aspx