Seasonal business is a hard bread.
The collections come in with a short exposition period. Most product lines are difficult to predict for replenishment. If the weather is unstable then the retailer is sitting on stock, well - stock-outs happen. High/low pricing is pure gambling. Profitability is so sensitive that every year many retailers get into trouble at the end of the season.
The same goes for the work of the store staff. Imagine the large quantities of products that come in. They have to present them, even if they are absolutely new in terms of shape, form, model, etc., they have to find the right place for samples and stock, they have to print all the labels and price tags. The stock in the backrooms is constantly changing, so finding the item you need is a challenge. When the sale starts, - the products are relabelled several times. At the end of the season you have to pack all the unsold products, find the missing pieces from the samples, pack the returns to the retailer's warehouse or to the supplier for the next season.
Profitability is so sensitive that every year many retailers get into trouble at the end of the season.
I was lucky enough to enjoy this work too. Initially, I worked as a sports/seasonal department manager, and in my first seasons I received my share of criticism from the buying and merchandising departments for the inappropriate or inadequate presentation of some products. Later, as a floor manager (assistant store manager) in the store I was assigned to, the seasonal department was a total shock in the worst sense of the word. The shelves were half empty, whereas in July they still had a lot of winter footwear and clothing. Employees could not get into the back room, which is normally used for product preparation (unpacking, ironing, security tagging). The room was packed to the roof with boxes, unpacked products, broken seasonal hardware (skis, lawnmowers).
t took the staff of the department and myself 3 weeks to sort all this out, replenish the shelves, return out-of-date stock to suppliers, sell off non-returnable stock, correct damaged, broken stock, etc and finally get the department back on track. There was no high level maths involved, just checking product by product.
If the management (store management, category management) misses this boat, the effort to normalise the stock is enormous. This means that daily checks & partial stocktaking should be carried out at the right level.
My main takeaway from this situation in those pre-AI days was that irregular or insufficiently accurate daily stock management creates more complexity with each new product arrival, practically a "snowball" effect.
A perfect view with "easy" external reasons, right? The concept of data-driven retailing was not popular at the time, so we worked with the proved method of persistence and toughness. Over a period of several months, we managed to improve the shrinkage rate and thus the realised margin.
Nowadays, a practical part of these activities could be supported by a proper daily stock management tool. One tool I know well is provided by Akuret Solutions. That offers features that could have significantly streamlined our processes and improved accuracy.
Check out the site and ask Jesper and Daniel how a highly automated and productive system can help in this difficult area of stock management.
Hope this helps,
Pavel Ryukhov
Paul Ryukhov
CEO/COO Ledo Supermarket
