Using analytics to optimize the retailer – vendor handshake
One of the biggest concerns for retail businesses is inventory management and procurement optimization. Finding a Solution for which could be the biggest victory for retail vendors.
Retail giants across the world, such as Walmart, Target, Lowe’s, and Costco wrangle with one of the most persistent problems in the industry: Inventory management and Procurement. Although we’ve come a long way from “out of stock” boards every Sunday, there is still a lot of shelf space for improvement (excuse the pun). Especially around the holidays and special shopping seasons, the supply and demand balance goes absolutely askew.
With buyer trends changing erratically, and affected like Wall Street, by every tweet and discourse, it becomes increasingly difficult for Retailers to get their inventory and procurement right.
But if you are wondering, as a Vendor, how does this affect you, you need to set your targets on this, pronto.
And working out the kinks in the process is gold – solve to fix wasted shelf space and unplanned procurement spends for your retail partners. Imagine creating an environment for your retail partners to optimize on product ordering using historical data and trend analysis.
Your retail partners will go to you, and only you, for all their procurement needs.
Sounds interesting? The key to this magic is retail analytics.
Although the benefits of analytics are far and wide, the retail space can definitely benefit substantially from analytics.
The Magic of Analytics
Analytics isn’t just numbers and charts on a dashboard – It’s the key to a successful business, every aspect of it. Consider Analytics as your personal advisor on how you can optimize everything, effectively stemming profit leaks and unplanned expenditures.
Analytics gives you the power to visualize data from all aspects of your business, and see them not as just silos of information and processes, but as an integrated living, breathing being of business.
In the retail sector, this is no different – from data on buyer behaviour, locational preferences, inventory shortfalls and excesses, product trends, et cetera, to advice on how you can fix each segment, and how fixing one segment could affect another, analytics could solve for all the gaps in the process.
But you’re reading this wrong: As a vendor, look at how much value you’d be offering your Retail partner with a full-fledged Retail Analytics Solution.