What's the biggest supply chain issue for CPG/Retail?

This morning I picked up a post for this blog from Visicom.  In summary

"We asked dozens of retail store managers this week: what’s the biggest issue you are having with product delivery by vendors? Know what they said? The biggest problem for most retailers is out of stock products."

Despite the low, probably unrepresentative sample size (dozens?) I think there is a ring of truth to this, but, is product delivery the biggest supply chain issue for CPG/Retail?  Not even close.

Do you need daily Point of Sale data? Do you like selling more product?

Most people report on their Point of Sale data in weekly or perhaps even monthly buckets .  If you are interested in seeing a long-term trend or annual seasonality that's OK, but if you really want to know what's going on, to ensure you have product on shelf, and promotions running when your target shoppers are in store - you need daily POS data.  Don't believe me?  Let's look at an example...

What's driving your Sales? SNAP?

SNAP is the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program” (formerly known as “Food Stamps”) in the United States.  . “We put healthy food on the table for more than 46 million people each month.” http://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/ Could this be driving spikes in your sales?  If you are involved with food/beverage sales in the United States, very possibly, it could.   SNAP sales spikes can be large and short-lived.  Ignore SNAP and your product may not be available on the shelf when it's needed, losing sales opportunities.

Clustering with a destination in mind

I've posted before on Cluster Analysis, in an attempt to demystify one of the more accessible and useful analytical approaches for CPG/Retail teams (see Cluster Analysis - 101) .

Finding groups of similar stores (for example) can be a very effective way to manage the complexity of offering each store group what they really need without having to deal with each one individually, a mammoth task.   Whether you are looking to find groups of stores, shoppers, regions, products or even sales patterns a very similar approach can work for you.

Clustering is part of the journey it's not a destination.  If you don't know and understand what decisions your analytic work should enable  (your destination) how can you build a good model?

Point of Sale Data – Category Analytics

If you haven’t already read the previous entries in this series, you may want to go back and check out [Point of Sale Data – the basics] to see why you really need a DSR to handle this data, and  [Point of Sale Data – Sales Analytics]  for some thoughts on analyzing sales drivers that are equally relevant to Category Management,

 As Category Manager you’re working with the retailer to help drive sales for the entire category.  You hopefully have access to the full data for your category (which could be substantially more than your account manager colleagues).  Let’s see how predictive analytics and modeling could help address some of your challenges:  How well are current planograms performing?  What is the best product assortment for each store?  How can you best balance customization of assortment by store with the work required to create that detail?