Information technology is a tool and its upto a skilled business user to find out ways to effectively use it. As with all retailers we have classified our SKU's into different assortment categories, one of the categories is "cores" which mean that these SKU's are the fast selling SKU's in our store and are marked as "category killers". We need to have 100% shelf replenishment for these SKU's and any short supply by the vendor means that we are loosing sales.
Again vendor monitoring and fill rate monitoring in the west is a basic implementation where retailers like Wallmart, Albertsons etc would penalize suppliers if their order fill rates are below a acceptable %. This concept again is relatively new in India as the vendors are just learning how to work with organized retailers.
This is proved by one of our senior category managers who has found a simple yet effective way to improve "fill rates" of the deliveries he gets from his prime vendors. He got our team to add a “fill rate” analysis in the Goods Receipt Note which our system generates whenever we get materials from our vendor. This additional page has a summary which gets printed whenever the vendor supplies goods that do not confirm to the original purchase order quantity. The idea is to highlight to the vendor that because of his “short supply” we have lost precious sales as the SKU’s are our cores and its imperative that these SKU’s supplies are as per our order quantity. The summary also has a “lost sale” figure to highlight to the vendor that his inefficiency has cost us sales.
This has immediately given the category head a way to make our vendors more sensitive to their commitments.
Thus small things matter … J
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