Seasons come and go, and with them come different product demands. This brings us to the question: how does seasonal scalability affect your inventory management? The answer to this question is complex and multifaceted. In this blog, we look at the various impacts of seasonal scalability on inventory management and offer an integrated solution to managing these events.
- Seasonal Demand: For most, retail products change with the season. Retailers need to ramp up or down on respective inventory levels at the beginning and end of each season. Knowing the seasonal cycle is critical to ensuring the product is available when the consumer wants it or ensuring that a retailer doesn’t get stuck with too much inventory at the end of a season.
- Changing Styles: Knowing what consumers will like from year to year can be risky business. Consumer preferences change, which can result in not having enough of the right product on the shelf when customers arrive or, worse, having too much of the wrong products they don’t like.
- Long-Tail Items: Having one of something is not the same as having it in slightly different colours and styles to satisfy consumer choices. This can result in even greater inventory planning challenges as the SKU proliferation increases. Adding online proliferation of choices can exacerbate the problem even further.
- Full Facing: Making sure that shelves look full is vital to attracting business. Nobody likes shopping at a store with bare shelves. This can create the need to keep higher levels of inventory to ensure the cupboards always look full. But will they sell?
- Promotions: Having a product in stock for a store promotion requires lots of coordination with vendors. Promotions usually result in driving higher volumes of consumers to the store. This is not the right time to run out of something because of a supplier shortfall.
SMART Retail is a DDMRP that offers a solution to all these problems. It can actively react in real-time to changes in demand, forecast seasonality, and deal with delays from suppliers. In the end, SMART Retail allows you to make sure you have the right stock in the right location at the right time, something that is priceless in today’s industry. To learn more about our many solutions ranging from the aerospace industry to high technology, visit us at sheaglobal.com.