Changes to the Lost Sales Metric in SKUtrak
9th February 2022
What is the change?
SKUtrak is introducing consistent lost sales calculations across more retailers. This is applied to any store reporting zero stock (in raw data) and is the difference between normal sales and achieved sales for that day.
The refinement is being applied to Morrisons and Asda imminently, and then across all retailer data feeds as we migrate data onto the new DSR in the next few weeks. We will be announcing each retailer migration via the ‘What’s New’ section of SKUtrak, 48 hours ahead of the change.
Background
We strive to make the data in SKUtrak as closely reflect your trading environment as possible. To this end, our SKUtrak data model is undergoing a major evolution right now - in the form of our new Demand Signal Repository (DSR) - which will provide both richer, faster management of the retail data you are already using in SKUtrak, and be capable of managing many new datasets as we progress through 2022 and beyond.
Some of the many improvements we are introducing relate to synthetic metrics; those measures that we derive from raw retailer data. One such metric pair is Lost Sales (Value and Volume), which are a representation of the opportunity cost of inventory gaps. Lost Sales estimates are just that - estimates; those retailers that provide this metric themselves all calculate it differently. We will be introducing a series of improvements to our Lost Sales metrics, making them consistent across all retailer data.
What does this mean for my SKUtrak service?
Those of you that are analysing or reporting lost sales for Asda will notice, once the change is live, that the lost sales metric reports higher than it was, whereas Morrisons will be lower. We are confident that these movements bring lost sales to a more realistic and consistent position.
As we migrate more retail data to the new DSR, these will benefit from the new lost sales calculations and we will continue to assess and improve all the SKUtrak synthesised metrics. For example, in the next few months, those of you on the SKUtrak Professional plan will start to receive additional demand decomposition metrics from our TruDemand analytical engine. In time, we will be offering SKUtrak Professional customers Lost Sales metrics based on TruDemand calculations, further improving your ability to track, understand and react to fluctuations in supply and demand.
