The key to fulfilling customer demand, minimizing lost sales, and preventing expensive backorders is having the right inventory on hand when needed. Initial fill rates, final fulfillment rates and backorder costs are the key metrics merchants need to measure inventory scheduling performance. Incremental improvements in these metrics as small as a single percentage point can provide six-figure improvements in annual profits.

Inventory scheduling begins with accurate demand planning. Whether you have a simple, single-channel ecommerce retailing business or a complex multichannel, multi-division catalog and ecommerce retail business, Forecast*21 and Venture*21 provide the demand planning solution that meets your needs.
 

If you have too little inventory on hand, you miss sales and incur the operating expenses associated with backorders. Too much inventory ties up cash and leads to higher overstocks and subsequently higher markdowns and lower gross margins. The keys to supply chain success are visibility of future weekly inventory needs, exception reporting to focus on the most critical pending problems, and timeliness to quickly align inventory levels with demand. Master Scheduling, Suggested Purchase Order and Open To Buy from Direct Tech provide this and more to optimize your inventory levels throughout the year.

Direct Tech’s Merchandise Assortment Planning and Page Analysis tools provide a complete view of item profitability. They support detailed analysis of actual merchandise performance and the creation of profitable future item assortment plans. This leads to increased sales, gross margins and bottom-line profits through more informed and timely assortment planning.