We all know that having an accurate count of stock is critical. But how accurate is the individual SKU count that we report to our Retailers?
This is a critical question. If you have 10 of a specific SKU in stock and are reporting ALL 10 SKUs to ALL RETAILERS – it can be pretty risky. It may be OK if you have only one or two retailers, but what if you have five (5), ten (10) or more retailers selling the same item? If all of your retailers sell all ten 10 SKUs it can lead to serious OVERSELLING, as well as subsequent chargebacks and impacts on your Dealer Scorecard.
Inversely, UNDERSELLING is just as bad but for different reasons. You may do your best to allocate and report SKU quantities to your retailers based on past sales performance but may still find yourself in a position where one retailer can sell more than expected or another retailer isn’t able to sell as much as expected. This UNDERSELLING represents a significant lost revenue opportunity.
Unless you have the capability to monitor how each of your retailers is performing on a constant basis and the ability to dynamically adjust SKU reporting up or down as needed, you are very likely to get caught in one of these situations. You can certainly try to control this manually, but unfortunately when you’re working with a large number of retailers it requires a great deal of data, is time consuming and can be error prone.
The ideal situation is to know the order volume by retailer and adjust inventory reporting for each SKU based on each retailer’s real-time performance. For example, if you have 20 SKUs in stock and Retailer ABC is given an inventory feed of 10 in stock and Retailer DEF is given an inventory feed of 10 in stock, it would be really advantageous to adjust this if Retailer ABC only sells 5 of the 10 SKUs allocated and Retailer DEF can sell much more.
This is just some of the capabilities that OPAL provides within one platform and without the need for numerous integrated systems. OPAL is a self-driving Order Processing and Warehouse Productivity Software Solution that enables your business to easily and quickly cut order processing costs to less than $1, increase the order handling capacity of your warehouse by 50% – 100% and achieve profitability expectations that you thought were unattainable.