SKUtrak: Understanding what is happening right now

With hundreds or thousands of distribution points for each of your products, tracking availability across your customers' stores is a serious challenge. Measuring yesterday's sales, stock or service levels in a week or a month from now provides you with no opportunity to improve availability in store tomorrow. You need to react today to understand opportunities and issues so that you can work with your retail customers to implement effective solutions.

It was hard enough to measure and impact availability when production was consistent and sales patterns seemed predictable. In the current environment - with production shortages impacting inbound supply, meeting unpredictable and fluctuating demand - the challenge of meeting your grocery customer expectations is greater than ever.

Traditional analysis - focused on measuring your sales performance, service levels and in-store availability - works well when demand and supply are predictable but has been revealed as inadequate under COVID and Brexit.

How can you:

Identify the probable true demand for your products, understand how this varies by season, region and promotional activity and evaluate achieved sales performance in this context?
Quickly assess stock levels across multiple customers, depots and stores so that you can prioritise order fulfilment when production fails to meet order demand?
Understand short-term order demand so that you can advise customers of potential issues, and propose effective solutions, before they occur?
Prioritise incremental sales opportunities based on value, moving beyond an Availability % score to reduce Lost Sales Value during promotional periods?

Thankfully, the Flow-of-Goods approach at the core of SKUtrak moves beyond point-in-time metrics like Availability % to provide rich, contextual insight into the value of missed sales opportunities through inadequate distribution, stock and service.

SKUtrak connects inbound (supplier to depot) and outbound (depot to store) service to depot and store stock levels, resulting in a comprehensive picture of stock positions and movements. This helps to identify where and why availability is below target and, when linked with achieved sales and predicted true demand, place a value on both distribution and stock gaps in store.

This approach allows you to prioritise action by product or location, or a combination of both, and pursue the fastest and simplest paths to value growth through:

Proposing increases and, where appropriate, decreases to product distribution in order to meet shopper demand
Identifying low-availability items and agreeing alternative product supply (e.g. pack size alternatives) as an interim measure
Identifying potential book stock errors and encouraging corrective action in store
Focusing field sales effort on product and store combinations that drive the greatest value for you and your retail customers

SKUtrak customers are able to:

Measure sales performance - in full context (over time, against peer products, by region) - in just minutes a day
Monitor the Flow-of-Goods into customer depot networks, through to store so that they detect availability and service issues daily
Rapidly identify, solve and communicate current and upcoming availability issues - focusing on proposed solutions rather than excuses
Develop a "trusted advisor" relationship with their grocery customers where their data-driven proposals are duly considered for execution