Replenishment Planning

The standard approach to replenishment planning is for demand planners to build complex Excel models and feed historical sales data to get future sales plans out. However, this is crude at best and delivers sub-optimal plans. Demand planning software modules from ERP vendors are not set up to deal with contemporary buying behaviour, which results in stock-outs, aged stock, and high working capital performance.

Traditional planning tools don’t account for the complexity and variability that drives modern retail. They used generalised models to produce generalised outcomes that typically assume most stores in a given area will behave similarly – which just isn’t true. Every store is unique, and to plan properly, you must plan at a unique PRODUCT location level and ensure you are dynamic enough to deal with changes and, therefore, mitigate out of stocks or obsolescence.

Quantiful is the leading demand planning software solution for retailers. It is capable of delivering millions of PRODUCT location plans every single day. It replaces most/all existing planning spreadsheets and is the foundation of an actual integrated planning process.

Leveraging the power of AI, Quanitful delivers accurate demand profiles at POS, so you can dynamically set min and max levels for each product for each store. Forecasts are built bottom-up – by product location and driven by a range of inputs, including historical sales data, POS information and, potentially, third-party data sources that bring external data sets into the model.

Forecasts are accessible to planners through the Quantiful GUI and, once accepted, are fed back into your ERP for replenishment. Let the Quantiful software deliver stock replenishment unsupervised to your stores where there is a high degree of confidence. And when there isn’t, don’t worry , Quantiful will alert you based on pre-set variance tolerances so you can intervene manually and remediate at any level in your data hierarchy.

With a significant proportion of PRODUCT locations being planned and fulfilled automatically, planners can focus on higher-value activities and bring a more profound understanding of the operation of the business.

Flat data files containing millions of lines of data are uploaded into Quantiful’s data lake daily. Quantiful then consolidates sales data and its associated attributes and then runs AI algorithms over the top to produce bottom-up demand forecasts. These forecasts are pushed back to your inventory management system to drive automated fulfilment processes.

Any forecast anomalies are flagged so staff can intervene before they become out-of-stock or obsolescence issues.

Quantiful customers are achieving remarkable results. They are seeing improving stock availability and increasing stock turnover, which leads to more sales and lower working capital requirements. Quantiful would expect our retailers to reach 90% replenishment running unsupervised, an 8% improvement in stock availability in store, and a 1.25 multiple to stock turn.