Newport Beach, Calif. – Feb. 21, 2011- Allocation represents a retailer’s last chance to ensure
that products their consumers want to buy are available in the right store, at the right time and
for the right price. At stake are sales, profit margins and customer loyalty.
“With a growing emphasis on consumer demand, an unpredictable market and the availability
of data that provides a granular view into exactly what their customers are buying and where,
retailers simply must get their allocations right from the start,” said Malcolm Buxton, president
and chief executive officer of JustEnough Software, a leader in demand management strategies
for retailers, distributors and brand owners worldwide. “Companies fighting for market share in
today’s highly competitive retail landscape need to execute carefully laid merchandising and
assortment plans with allocation strategies that are just as pensive.”
JustEnough recommends the following strategies to help retailers realize fewer markdowns and
increased sales with better allocation management:
Use Demand to Drive Allocations
All too often, consumer demand for product choice, color and size take a backseat in the
planning process. Retailers frequently put all of their focus and energy into planning
assortments based on last year’s numbers. The consequence? A self‐fulfilling prophecy in which
product is allocated based on historical information – whether that data served the retailer well
or not. Truly optimized allocations are driven by demand potential, rather than historical sales
alone. Ultimately, companies that ignore basic signals of consumer choice pay the price with
markdowns and lost sales.
In order to combat this challenge, retailers need to get smarter about the way they allocate
product. Solutions that leverage demand curves for items based on attributes for comparable
products or product categories can help businesses set the level of expected future sales, as well
as minimize the risk involved in launching new products.
Think Locally, Get Rid of Store Clusters
Retailers should reconsider allocating product based on loosely defined store clusters. Grouping
stores by demographics and past sales performance and buying patterns was a helpful approach
before store‐level data became widely available. Research shows that store behavior actually
varies greatly and changes often – especially as consumers become more and more discerning
about what they’ll buy and for how much.
No matter what their size, today’s retailers have no excuse for relying on cluster‐based,
suboptimal allocations. Technology that’s available on a variety of platforms and for almost any
budget can help retailers seeking demand‐driven, localized allocation recommendations for
first‐time products. Such systems are capable of monitoring how hundreds of thousands of
individual stores and products behave, giving retailers invaluable insight that can drive improved
allocation management at the store level.
Adopt a Push-to-Pull Strategy
Yesterday’s retailers would blindly push products out to the market, crossing their fingers in
hopes that consumers will buy them before they must slash prices. Retailers now use demand
forecasts to ensure that there is a market for products they put into their stores – and that they
will be purchased sooner rather than later.
For new products such as ever‐changing fashion lines, retailers should use attribute‐based
demand profiles to push new products to stores. They can then switch to a pull strategy in which
inventory levels are adjusted automatically according to actual consumption. Pull systems
simply respond to consumer demand. Modern allocation solutions can help retailers bridge the
gap between push and pull strategies, ensuring that product arrives at the location it needs to,
when the time is right. As a result, slow‐moving products and lost sales are minimized while
profit margins grow.
Hold Some Inventory Back
Understanding a product’s anticipated lifecycle is key to optimizing allocations – especially for
items that have short lifecycles. For example, some fashion items might have a six‐ to eightweek
lifecycle. Oftentimes, the inventory arrives at the retailer’s distribution center in just one
delivery.
Although some sort of logic has been used in advance to determine which stores the product
will have the best chance of selling at full price, retailers should give themselves some wiggle
room. After all, allocation is not an exact science. When possible, retailers should employ a
“hold‐back” strategy. In a week or two, retailers will have some intelligence on how well their
original allocation strategy is working. Holding some inventory back instead of pushing it all out
to the market at once allows retailers to adjust future allocations for that product, taking into
account shifts in consumer‐buying and store‐selling behaviors. Replenishing product based on
demand is pertinent since it’s too costly to try to move it between stores after it’s gone out. And,
once stock is in the wrong place it’s more likely to be marked down while other locations lose
out on sales.
Make Allocation Management a Priority
It’s apparent that allocation is an important part of the overall retail process. Companies that
make good decisions when it comes to creating demand‐driven, localized allocations, move from
a push‐to‐pull strategy and hold some inventory back after their initial allocation will be better
equipped to deal with today’s unpredictable consumer and ever‐changing retail environment.
JustEnough’s advanced Allocation solution takes all of the guesswork out of allocating products
to stores where they have the best chance of selling at the highest price. More than 500 of the
world’s leading brands leverage JustEnough’s demand management solutions offered on the
company’s OnCloud, OnSite and OnMobile platforms. For more information, visit
www.justenough.com or e‐mail info@justenough.com.
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