Workflow: Incremental Orders (Store Specific Orders)

Problem Statement

Are you having trouble identifying opportunities to increase store sales with your retail buyer? Has it been difficult persuading your retail buyer to increase order quantities? Alloy is here to help. 

How Alloy Can Help

There are 3 key triggers to identifying opportunities for incremental orders at the store level:

1. When store/item locations are OOS or low WOS (weeks of supply) with no replenishment coming

2. Phantom Inventory - When you’ve identified out of stock stores or stores that think they have your product in stock but actually don’t. If it’s not on the shelf, it won’t sell. If the store thinks it’s on the shelf when it really isn’t, it won’t be reordered. Maybe it’s in the back and not making it to the shelf.

3. Gaps between Forecasts and Actuals

1. Low Inventory (OOS or Low WOS) With No Replenishment

Using Alloy, you are able to quickly filter through noise in data and find data at the granularity you need. For example, through the template attached, you are able to drill down from Walmart WHSE groupings down to Distribution Centers, to Products, and all the way down to the Store level to look into the inventory metrics you need. 

In the above screenshot, we see a sample product drilled down to the store level. From this view, we are able to see that in this item/store combination, there are no units on hand, and no replenishment coming into the store. In the table, you are able to see a lost sales $ for this item/store combination where you can sort by descending order to help prioritize stores that have higher potential value.

2. Phantom Inventory

Alloy also has a built in metric that helps you identify phantom inventory instances - situations where the stores think they have inventory, but in reality, they don't. In the example below, we used Alloy to identify instances where phantom inventory may be at play. We can see that for this sample product, there are 22 locations in DC6024 that may have phantom inventory. Unit sales for this store in the past week has been 0, while unit sales, on a weekly average has been 5 per week for the trailing 4 weeks, 4 weeks ago. Lastly there is 7 units on hand at this store for this product.

Instead of running all these various filters and creating many different formulas to identify these instances, Alloy helps you do this at the click of a button.

3. Gaps Between Forecast and Actuals

One of the easiest ways to convince your buyer to purchase more is to compare their forecasts to actual sales. Alloy allows you to quickly use exception based reporting to filter down to the products that have higher actual sales compared to forecasts, as shown below.

If your products are constantly selling above forecasts, it becomes an easy sell to the buyers to adjust their forecasts and purchase more product!

Case in Point

Using Alloy, one of our Consumer Electronic client was able to generate $20MM in additional revenue via Walmart SSOs. By having a great relationship with your buyer, you are able to make this process a lot smoother! Alloy has a lot of capabilities to help you with that - whether it is helping reduce spoils so the retailer has less loss, providing them insights on where products are selling, and in general, providing them data insights to help your buyer's jobs easier! 

How to set up your Alloy dashboard

• Sign in to app.alloy.ai
• Click Analysis at the top, and select the tag Alloy Applications Templates
• Open the dashboard called Template - Incremental Orders (SSO)
• From the drop down next to Save, select Save As, and name your new dashboard
• Note: If you do not see the template in your instance, please message your Client Solutions Lead!

Template adjustments

Next you'll need to make a few dashboard edits to focus in on the relevant data. 

• Add a partner filter to select the retail partner(s) where your product is selling
• Add a product filter to select the relevant new items. You can either use the retailer product ID (e.g. Target DPCI), your company product code (e.g. Vendor SKU) or a category
• Review the metric filters in each tab. For example, we look at unit sales, but if you want to use sales $, you can easily adjust that as well!

Tip: Ask your CS Lead for ways to use Alloy to format data to fit your Walmart SSO forms!