The Challenge

The furniture retailer needed a single dashboard solution which would merge their product range with inventory statistics and sales performance data and supplier performance indicators to enhance their category management decision-making abilities.

Data existed across multiple tools; reporting was slow and inconsistent across teams.

Pain points

• The system failed to provide adequate visibility about stock-out events and slow-moving items and supplier delivery delays which resulted in product losses and unnecessary inventory accumulation.
• Manual reconciliation between commercial, supply chain and finance views delayed decisions.

Objective

• The system requires a governed category cockpit which includes common KPIs and actionable segmentation (A/B/C and fast/slow movers) and a scheduled review process.

Our Role and Approach

• Analytics + operating rhythm
• The system unites POS data with inventory information and purchase orders and supplier master data into a single complete model.
• The organization established a standard KPI package which included sales performance and margin levels and stock availability and stock depletion rates and delivery timeliness and supplier delivery schedules.
• The system requires a dashboard construction that uses Power BI to create an interactive dashboard which enables users to access store/category/SKU details through drill-down functionality and provides weekly category review reports.
• The company implemented two main strategies for improvement. The organization trained its category managers to perform their duties effectively while developing decision templates which included procedures for handling slow-moving products and supplier emergency situations and product reordering thresholds.

Key findings/ Suggestions

• The system needs to perform demand forecasting and replenishment recommendation functions which will convert its decision-making system from descriptive to prescriptive.
• The system needs supplier scorecards which should contain particular action owners and established escalation protocols.

The Result

• Category management cockpit consolidating multi-source data into one dashboard with standard KPIs and self-service analysis.
• Improved alignment across commercial, supply chain and finance via one KPI language.

Quantified impact

• Control-tower style visibility programs have reported inventory reductions of 5-15% and OTIF improvements of 5-7%.
• +3% case fill-rate improvement without additional working capital.