Resources

The demand driven supply chain is a retail optimization model developed and made popular by AMR Research. AMR defines DDSN as a system of technologies and processes that sense and react to real-time demand across a network of customers, suppliers, and employees. AMR benchmark research shows that those who do not implement supply chain improvement... Read more »

The Accelerated Analytics® service provides category managers with a robust tool for analyzing sales and inventory at a store level. Not only for the current week, but also for all the weeks of selling in the database. Armed with this data, the category manager can very effectively identify slow moving items and stock-out’s on a... Read more »

The efficient consumer response (ECR) movement effectively began in the mid-nineties and was characterized by the emergence of new principles of collaborative management along the supply chain. The underlying premise was that by collaborating with trading partners, the supply chain could become more efficient, eliminate excess inventory, and ultimately provide a more efficient response to... Read more »

Why does an outsourced service make sense? Using an outsourced service for POS data analysis is a great idea, because loading data every week and managing servers is not your core business- it’s an expense.  And worse yet, the data and technology change all the time, which makes them very expensive to manage in-house. Accelerated... Read more »

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 »