Right range, right place, right stock
A grocery retailer was looking to understand the benefits that could be achieved from an F&R system transformation across their high-street stores, business park locations, and B2B operation.
The business had been embracing the philosophy of “more range equals more sales”. This approach had started to stretch their supply chain too thin, leading to inefficiencies and higher costs. Our mission was to identify untapped opportunities to streamline operations, and provide actionable, data-driven insights to optimise their processes and position them for long-term success.
When more isn’t always better
We began with a data collection phase, cleaning and transforming over a billion rows of aggregated transactional sales data, extracted from the client’s ERP system.
Through detailed analysis, we found that 20% of product sub-categories had expanded in range but didn’t drive more sales. In other words, these products were cannibalizing sales from other items while increasing operational headaches.
We communicated this back to the business visually using a scatter chart, where each circle represents a sub category, and its size is it’s total sales value. This kind of simple visualisations serves as a powerful way of quickly communicating data insights.
In direct response to the analysis, the business were able to take action, reducing the size of particular ranges and running more targeted in-store experiments.
Finding missed opportunities across the stores network
Additional analysis on this project looked at stock availability across individual stores.
Combined with the sales data, we spotted another potential opportunity: some of the retailer’s best-performing products weren’t available in all stores. These stock misalignments were holding back potential sales across their network.
Armed with these data-backed assumptions, the client had a roadmap to trial swapping out some fast-selling, low stocked SKUs with slow-selling fully stock products, to create tests for improved profitability.
Smarter Inventory Management
Across the project, we modelled a number of conservative improvements, including:
- Streamlining range sizes to increase SKU-productivity.
- Reducing stock cover for low-performing, high-stock products.
- Increasing stock availability for high-performing, understocked items.
The combined identified potential inventory savings amounted to £7.0m–£12.2m, plus a £2.4m annual reduction in waste volume.
This project wasn’t just about quick wins. It gave the retailer a clear path forward, including a roadmap to fully embrace an F&R transformation. With a solid understanding of the costs and benefits, they were ready to take the next steps toward a more efficient, customer-focused supply chain, and see measurable results.
