Revolutionizing Inventory Management and Retail Analytics with AI-powered Tools
The ability to efficiently test and strategize inventory management is paramount in today's fast-paced retail environment. Advanced AI solutions are changing how retailers manage their stock and providing groundbreaking insights that help drive growth and profitability. This is accomplished by optimizing the assortment strategy based on customer behavior, store clustering, and planogram configurations.
A study by IHL Group estimated that retailers lose nearly $1 trillion in sales annually due to out-of-stock situations. This is significant and highlights the importance of effective inventory management to ensure products are available when customers want them. What this all means? The key point is - Nothing Matters Unless The Product is on the Shelf.
Here are ten (10) ways AI will help.
Firstly, AI solutions allow you to establish supply thresholds to prevent understocking across stores. This is achieved by assessing the supply levels and adjusting them to meet each store's unique demand. Moreover, the ability to test different store clustering models and get immediate financial results is invaluable. This lets you anticipate growth impacts and communicate effectively with buyers on potential outcomes.
The platform provides powerful capabilities to test high-level strategic theories, such as reducing the number of mods for the lowest-performing stores and investing more in the better-performing ones. This could lead to more optimized and efficient mod management by reducing redundancies and boosting sales and margins.
AI solutions facilitate quicker and more reliable testing and analysis than traditional manual methods. You can easily configure and apply merchandising rules that guide how products are presented on the shelves. These rules consider many factors, such as product facings, pack-out rules, and supply days.
Moreover, these tools offer an easy-to-use interface for rule-writing, which utilizes store and product attributes for filtering and search purposes. This is vital in setting rules for specific brands, manufacturers, products, or geographic regions. Plus, it has safeguards that prevent the planogram from changing excessively at the initial stages, creating a safe buffer for retailers.
Importantly, these AI tools provide a clear visual of the impact of changes on the planogram. They can highlight new items driving growth and even export all planograms in your preferred format. This makes the transition seamless, and the generated planograms are almost retail-ready, with minor touch-ups often needed for brand blocking to meet the specific preferences of retail buyers.
With regard to exporting planograms, the AI-powered tools ensure a fit-for-shelf output without any glitches. While the tool may need minor touch-ups for the artistic aspects of the planogram, technical assistance is available to ensure the data is set up correctly for the retailer.
These tools come with an export feature for assortment data to further simplify the process. This allows you to report additions, keeps, and deletes back to the buyer. As a user, you can even clone scenarios and apply them to different cases without rewriting the rules each time.
In summary, AI-powered tools redefine the retail industry by offering a data-driven inventory management and analysis approach. They provide category leaders and space management teams with the ability to test out scenarios, generate immediate results, and make informed, strategic decisions. CPG and retailers can use AI platforms to drive growth, optimize operations, and enhance their overall business performance.