How to streamline and optimize the merchandise procurement process
Retailing requires working with sources, suppliers and vendors who sell products that merchandisers have determined they want to sell. Merchandisers spend countless hours researching, negotiating and purchasing items from manufacturers, wholesalers and producers. It’s a never-ending cycle of analyzing demand, planning products, price, and assortment, identifying suppliers, putting together orders, purchasing inventory and monitoring sales.
Buying the right amount of merchandise is probably one of the oldest and most challenging problems that retailers face. Not only that but finding the time to go through all the data that retailers have and collect can be a struggle. It can be a manual process, but at the end of the day, that is how merchandisers see what the most profitable products and assortments will be to buy.
Today, many retailers still manually calculate orders. Manual calculations are very time consuming and oftentimes leads to emotional decisions making. This process is prone to inaccuracies that, in turn, result in excess inventory or lost sales.
Stop the merchandising madness!
What retailers need is a tool that enables them to have the vendor orders automatically calculated, planned, and prepared for them, right at their fingertips.
Well, guess what? That tool exists!
While most planning and forecasting tools use analytics to help planners with knowing how much inventory is needed, merchandisers would gain the most productivity (and sanity) from a tool that automatically prepares the vendor orders for them. A Vendor Order Optimization solution, like the module that is part of the 4R Intelligent Inventory Optimization Platform, projects inventory that will be needed throughout the supply-chain. It uses projections to optimize orders, subject to vendor requirements and delivers the prepared orders to the buyer to process.
When the view into the supply chain process becomes clearer, a merchandiser can gain control over the purchasing process. Retailers not only gain efficiency due to the automation; they also can reduce excess inventory and improve their supply chain operations for maximum profit.
To learn more about how 4R helps stop the merchandising madness, download our Vendor Order Optimization solution brief.