Inventory
Stock data
Running out of stock, or having the wrong stock level, are major concerns for today’s retailers. With the Pricer inventory management system a stores’ stock data can be improved and inventory checks simplified.
Inventory
How to fully utilise Pricer power
There are a couple of ways how your shop can best use our inventory management.
The first method is to simplify the search for suspect stock levels by highlighting products with a low or even negative theoretical stock. This is done outside opening hours by shifting all labels to a staff page that shows supply chain-related information such as stock level, next delivery date, batch sizes and similar. This is usually coupled with flashing the labels where there is reason to suspect that the data is bad or that something is wrong, typically negative theoretical stock and non-moving items. www.pricer.com 14 Customer experience Pricer’s solutions for inventory management are widely used by our customers.
One example is a major retail chain with 650 stores, ranging from convenience stores to supermarkets and hypermarkets, in a European country that has used these solutions for several years allowing employees to work more easily and efficiently. Every morning, until 15 minutes before the store opens, they shift the information on the labels to display the inventory status which is also shown on their personal digital assistant (PDA). They can check the theoretical stock, last day of order and ordered amount, planned or past delivery dates and quantities, the average sale of the week, etc. directly on the shelves and for each of the products.
Thanks to the interconnection of the Pricer ESL system with the customer’s own backoffice applications, their reference prices are shown on the labels, but the Pricer system can collect the information concerning the management of the stores and display them on the additional pages on all labels whether they are segment or e-paper labels. The speed of the Pricer communication system based on optical wireless communication technology allows the system to be set so that these management pages are displayed at a time set by the store. It is also possible to view these pages in real-time using Pricer’s remote control, a simple but flexible tool for various kinds of shelf edge use cases.
Negative stock means that the theoretical stock in the system is less than zero, which is obviously not possible; non-moving items are when the system sees that an item which normally sells fast have not sold any recently (can be during the day or for a full day depending on the POS-data available). Inventory checks are thus greatly simplified by using flash to bring immediate focus. Flashing can also be used for high priority items (items on promotion, with high margin or seasonal)
The second solution is to find critical items throughout the day. The employees again use Instant Flash and map to locate the items to check. The same checks can of course be made here: negative stock, non-moving items or high priority checks. The value of the solutions is both on time save and in improved stock level data. The latter is very important for e-commerce and for not binding up more capital in stock than absolutely needed.
Inventory
Replenishment made easy
The biggest single process in a store is the replenishment of shelves. A typical supermarket puts tens of thousands of products on their shelves every day. It is a very time-consuming task and also one that is surprisingly error-prone. If the employee does not check the price tag properly, there is a risk that the product ends up in the wrong place or hides the correct product. The consequences are that the right product might not be replenished with correspondingly reduced sales and that the stock levels end up wrong on both the correct and the wrong product.
Inventory
Instant Flash: a real time-saver
With the replenishment process being guided by Pricer’s system, risks are reduced and replenishment work is sped up. This is achieved by letting the employee simply scan the barcode on the product that needs to be replenished using a handheld device. When this is done, the system immediately does two things. Firstly, on a map of the store, it shows exactly where the product is. Secondly, and most importantly, it triggers the flash on the label.
Inventory
Removes risk and increases speed
The flash and the map allow the employee to find the product quicker and also remove the risk of putting the product at the wrong price tag. The end result is that shelves are better and more correctly stocked in less time. As a side effect, stores become neater and better run – factors that are known to increase sales. The guided replenishment is also easier, which means a reduced need for training and store knowledge, making staffing easier and more affordable.
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Before the store opens, labels flash to indicate negative stock.
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The employees immediately see where the products in stock are negative.
