Problem

The leading brand in the women’s handbags and accessories industry segment had a spread of 300+ retail sale points and wanted to increase its SSS (Same stores sales) by exploring improvement in stocking and supply practices.

Solution

We examined the retail backend operations of Stock allocation and refilling.

Following key interventions were made:
We clustered various POS into A, B and C class depending on their sales and determined their order servicing levels (SLAs) accordingly.
We broke the practice of batching all orders for a retailer once every week in favour of servicing the POS according to the new class/grade clusters. We approached the client’s customers for a flexible Purchase order issue to suit the new order indenting and supply regime.

We took into account the sales patterns of weekday versus weekends and changed the order supply schedules for top class POS to receive a fresh supply before the weekend.
We implemented necessary changes in the warehousing operations to be able to ship frequent and small deliveries.

Outcome

There was a 5% to 8% increase noticed in SSS across client’s POS overall, and in A class stores, the SSS increase ran in double digits.