Resources

What is EDI 852 Data? There’s a number of benefits retailers can gain thanks to their EDI 852 data. Just in case you don’t know what EDI 852 is, let us explain it like this. EDI 852 files are usually referred to as “product activity data” or “product activity report.” A product activity report (EDI... Read more »

Retailers and vendors in today’s retail market face the unenviable challenge of reducing costs and maintaining margins, despite falling overall sales and slow-to-recover consumer demand. One of the areas in which retailers are pushing back onto vendors, is inventory management, which for vendors too often translates into retail partners that reduce overall inventories and require... Read more »

Vendors know an out of stock or empty peg is a very bad thing, so it’s hard to understand why most vendors are not managing their retail sales at a store and item level. Here is what we calculated for a vendor this week to estimate their lost sales due to out of stocks. The... Read more »

There are no shortage of articles on Walmart in today’s press. Some are positive, but many are written from a viewpoint of fear. Here are some interesting facts from a recent article titled “The Elephant in the Room” by Greg Buzek, which was printed in the May 2007 RIS News. The article paints the picture... Read more »

If you are a Wal-Mart vendor, you have access to a wealth of data via Retail Link.  As a service provider, we work with a lot of Wal-Mart vendors, helping them to analyze the point of sale data made available by Wal-Mart through Retail Link.   Sometimes a vendor will ask us “If I have Retail... Read more »

Show of hands, how many of you know how to calculate price elasticity? Well, if you are like me, you know the general concept but the math is a bit rusty. So, here is a quick and dirty refresher. Price elasticity is a measure of how demand for a product is influenced by price changes.... Read more »

Sell through (or sell-thru) is a very useful metric for vendors to use in evaluating item performance, because it provides a composite measure of sales and inventory. But like many business measures, there is more than one method of calculating sell through. The most common calculation is: Sell Thru % = Units Sold / (Units... Read more »

The strategic importance of walking a store with your retail merchant has been growing dramatically in the last several months.  Retailers like Home Depot and Wal-Mart are putting a strong emphasis on merchants spending more time in stores, so they can see firsthand the product presentation and get the pulse of what is happening at... Read more »

Forecasting is part mathematics and part art, and due to this,  it can be extremely complex, but even simple forecasting can be very valuable.  Many vendors get too tied in a knot over the complexity of item and store level forecasting and then nothing gets done.  We encourage all vendors to start with the basics... Read more »