True Inventory eliminates phantom inventory and boosts store efficiency

Understanding on-hand inventory and demand are critical to inventory accuracy, yet up to 60% of retailers’ inventory records are inaccurate, causing lost sales and customer frustration. That’s why new predictive inventory capabilities from RELEX Solutions combat these challenges, helping retailers boost store operations’ productivity in inventory management and improve inventory accuracy for replenishment. This will result in improved store efficiency, reduced stockouts, and enhanced customer satisfaction.

Retailers face multiple inventory concerns, from inventory drift to phantom inventory. Phantom inventory is a major challenge and occurs when inventory systems show items as available that are not actually on hand. This situation can result from multiple issues, such as incorrect scanning during goods receipt, theft, weighing errors by consumers, and misplaced or missing items not being accurately tracked.

“Retailers encountering phantom inventory are challenged with ordering products either too soon or too late, causing storage issues, or worse, spoilage and lost sales,” said Stuart Douglas, Product Lead, Forecasting & Replenishment, RELEX. “With RELEX True Inventory, our new predictive inventory capabilities address this challenge head-on, while also addressing store-led ordering, to improve replenishment accuracy and store efficiency, while helping to improve sales margins.”

Leveraging advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), RELEX True Inventory establishes a more precise view of inventory balance on hand, identifying inventory anomalies and providing store operatives with prioritized recommendations for the most value-adding inventory checks. This is driven from a new approach to leveraging AI including using probabilistic modelling to pinpoint the right products to direct store associates to, while leveraging the RELEX ML demand forecasting capability.

With this innovation, AI is used to improve data accuracy because RELEX True Inventory builds and maintains perpetual inventory from POS transactions, constantly learning from new data streamed into RELEX. This enables the use of replenishment ordering technology even when inventory data is unavailable, which is particularly beneficial for fresh products. With this approach, True Inventory consolidates all inventory counting activities into one system, streamlining cycle count management.

Key benefits of RELEX True Inventory are:

• Enhanced Inventory Accuracy: Automated corrections and precise inventory records lead to better ordering accuracy.
• Improved Store Efficiency: Focused and actionable inventory checks reduce the time spent on inventory management.
• Reduced Stockouts: Timely corrections prevent potential sales losses and enhance customer satisfaction.

“Among the key inputs for effective replenishment, stock is the one factor we didn’t manage directly within our supply chain consistently. True Inventory is a valuable tool that helps us with reducing typical stock deviations as well as phantom stocks, enabling us to place orders that better meet the store's actual inventory and thus true demand, rather than just theoretical ones,” said Jose Ramon Franco, Supply Chain Manager, Ametller Origen.

About RELEX

RELEX Solutions provides a unified supply chain and retail planning platform that aligns and optimizes demand, merchandising, supply chain, operations, and production planning across the end-to-end value chain. We help retailers and consumer goods companies like ADUSA, AutoZone, Coles, Dollar Tree and Family Dollar, M&S Food, PetSmart, and The Home Depot drive profitable growth across all sales and distribution channels, leading to higher product availability, increased sales, and improved sustainability. Learn more at: https://www.relexsolutions.com/customers/

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