CV-19 Insights

Too much data, too many reports, too much confusion

In today’s fast paced retail environment, taking the time to sift through data to find actionable insights is a luxury. A Fortune 50 CPG client of RSi realized this and reached out to us to help turn their massive volumes of store/item data into easy- to-use and insightful solutions to manage inventory flow more effectively.

Before talking with RSi, the CPG company was sending multiple reports across the organization, each requiring a significant amount of manual effort and causing redundancies and inefficiencies. Every report focused on a different area of inventory and cash flow management, such as:

• Sell-through rates
• Store performance
• Inventory cost
• Units on hand

Realizing this duplication of effort was costly and time consuming, the company turned to RSi for a better way. They needed a consolidated and prescriptive report available to all account managers that would allow them to track shipments, analyze sales, and find their optimal stock level. The turnkey solution needed to have as little human interference as possible while still delivering on a regular basis valuable, specific and thorough outputs.

We met with the client’s analyst team to discuss the key questions they needed to answer, the best measures to accomplish their goals, and the optimal level of granularity. Given that they wanted one report for all account managers, we also wanted to provide something that would address their multiple needs in a consistent format.

Driving bottom-line growth with real-time insights

RSi’s Essential Growth Drivers are built into RSi’s Retail Visibility (RV) solution, the most scalable, proven, and robust analytics platform that derives insights from near real-time data at the most granular level. With RV and the Essential Growth Drivers, customers can enjoy insightful and prescriptive interactive reports enabling them to sift through the “noise,” and perform strategic and agile analysis of their data. While there are reports that support all phases of the product lifecycle, the customer identified the most value from the Excess Inventory Report. With this report they saw immediate opportunities to minimize costs by eliminating avoidable expenses caused by mark-downs, returns or stock shifts resulting in the identification and reduction of excess inventory.

Significant productivity improvements and profitability

RSi’s new Essential Growth Drivers quickly provided the customer with a scalable solution that addressed user requirements across store locations and streamlined the analytics and reporting needs for inventory and cash flow management. The Essential Growth Drivers are a series of reports designed to maximize sales and minimize costs by calling attention to opportunities for optimization across new product launches, promos/events, base sales and product run down and are focused on revenue-driven, corrective actions in-store.

This unified approach to reporting saved the analysts from manually creating and delivering individual reports across the organization. The account managers no longer needed to spend time interpreting the results for their specific location. Additionally, with deep insights easily accessible, inventory decisions to take specific actions were made quickly, resulting in better inventory management and cost savings.  As an added benefit, once the solution was put into place, the number of calls and emails plummeted from people asking for assistance to interpret the data.

Going forward, this major CPG company looks forward to benefiting from other Essential Growth Driver reports. They are looking for these reports to enable them to maximize sales and minimize costs by calling attention to opportunities for optimization across new product launches, promos/events, base sales, and product run down.

Additional Resources:

Root Cause Analysis of Excess Inventory: https://retailsolutions.force.com/s/article/Playbook-Preventing-Excess-Inventory-Root-Cause-Analysis

How to Create a Report to Measure Inventory: https://retailsolutions.force.com/s/article/RV-Report-Type-Inventory-Summary

Growth Drivers Excess Inventory Report: https://retailsolutions.force.com/s/article/Growth-Driver-Excess-Inventory