The New Normal

Change has been forced upon us all as consumers, our daily routines have changed beyond recognition. Data suggests the "weekly" shop is the new normal, hardly surprising when we are in #lockdown although demand patterns are normalising across key categories and panic buying has largely come to an end. 

During this period of unprecedented change, SKUtrak has continued to enable FMCG businesses to make informed decisions based on analytical insights from retailer sales data and inventory availability at a frequency once thought to be unnecessary - this is now "The New Normal"

Pressure to restore product availability requires better use of data: identifying and quickly responding to demand signals throughout the supply chain will help FMCG suppliers to make better decisions about where and how to allocate stock.  

We launched SKUtrak "Stock In Trade" as an additional free* service following discussions with our key customers during the most challenging times - showing our agile development cycle in making this available within two weeks.

This will help you to better understand where stock of your products is located across your major customers’ stores and depots, in response to the unusual buying patterns that we are currently experiencing.

SKUtrak Stock-in-Trade provides:

• An aggregate stock and sales cover profile across ALL retailers that form part of your SKUtrak Standard+ service - at category, subcategory and SKU levels;
• A depot breakdown - again in aggregate, across ALL retailers - so that you can review current stock and put that in the context of stock movements over the past 28 days.

The set of dashboards help you to assess stock positions, determine stock cover, decide on where to prioritise stock in response to retailer orders and better meet the needs of your shoppers and consumers.

Not only is it valuable to have a picture of your stock in trade, it is also important to be able to see how stores are performing and which stores might need assistance in improving on-shelf availability. With field sales resources currently not as available, FMCGs are turning to store level data to help identify the stores with the biggest issues.

SKUtrak Store Insights is helping many of our customers. This service alerts you to stores that are under-performing, running out of stock, and have stock-errors. Further enhancing the collaboration with your retailers to ensure that the right products get to the right place at the right time.

We are delighted to be helping our customers #feedthenation and we would like to thank all the key workers for your dedication and bravery in these unprecedented times.

For more information how SKUtrak could help your business, watch this short video to see how SKUtrak has helped our customers.

* the service is free for our subscription customers