Being out of stock at stores can have a big impact on your sales and customers. You can use Crisp's in-stock data to help you identify where store stock outs occur and take action to remedy them.
Note: Crisp currently only has in-stock data for Walmart.
To identify store stock outs:
- From the dashboard menu at the top-left of the screen, in the Walmart Retail Link section, select Explore > In-Stock.
- If you want to get a snapshot of your in-stock performance, review the Latest Day in Stock tile.
- If you want to understand what is driving your in-stock performance:
- In the by Product table, sort the data descending by the Latest Day in Stock column.
- Review this table to find products with low in-stock percentages that are sold in a lot of stores (you can see store count in the Stores column). In this case, we can see two products (the Mint Chip and Ginger cookies) meet this criteria. Select these two products to filter the dashboard for them.
Hint: To select multiple rows in a table, you can use Ctrl+click (on a PC) or Cmd+click (on a Mac). - Similarly, in the Region table, let's sort the table descending by the Latest Day in Stock tile. We can see that there are several regions with out of stocks, but there are two with high points of distribution (region 2 and 13), so let's focus on those. Select those two regions to filter the dashboard for them.
- In the by Store table, you can see which stores have the lowest in stock percentages. You can use this list to try to address issues at the store level.
- In the by Product table, sort the data descending by the Latest Day in Stock column.
To determine the cause of store stock outs and take action:
- From the dashboard menu at the top-left of the screen, in the Walmart Retail Link section, select Explore > Inventory.
- Filter the dashboard for the products you identified in the previous section as driving store stock outs.
- In the cases on hand by dc table, sort the table in descending order by the Weeks of Supply column to see if your weeks of supply are low.
In this case, we can see that our weeks of supply are low in several distribution centers. - If the weeks of supply are not low at the DCs, filter the dashboard for the last 36 weeks to see if weeks of supply have been low prior to the current timeframe.
- If your weeks of supply are or have been low, work internally with your employees to make sure you are consistently shipping on time and in full.
- If there are no issues with shipping on your end, you can try one of the following solutions to remedy the issues:
- Check with your buyer to see if the forecasting system on their end is accurately gauging inventory needs.
- If the forecasting system isn't the issue, check with your buyer to see if any other system issues are preventing your product(s) from moving from the DC to stores, such as a product being labeled inactive or incorrectly categorized in the inventory system.