Sales Grew $47M

Cost Savings $84M

Risk Reduction $23M

Ad ROI Saves $38M

The Situation:

A client had hired a third party merchandising firm to visit and report on their store locations. The firm consistently reported that outlet locations were out-of-stock and had empty shelves. The client had no visibility to this problem and no way to track it or the revenue they have lost. Finally, they had no repeatable process to change the inventory deployment problem.

IMS started by investigating and understanding where the gaps were and how we could help. Once we had a clear understanding we developed a holistic means of analyzing store performance and lost sales on a weekly basis. We started by creating a process which gave the client the ability to track retailer outlet sales and inventory weekly. From there we conducted a "deep dive" analysis to help the client understand the lost sales revenue resulting from the empty shelves. IMS was also able to:

•   Create retailer scorecards to use with big box retailers and worst offenders


•   Create weekly "red alerts" for low stocks and out-of-stocks


•   Establish relationship and process between client operations and retailer


•   Integrate Out-of-Stocks and lost revenue into joint business scorecards

Benefits and Results:

•   In-stock percentage grew to over 93% for major SKUs


•   Value of converted lost sales = $47+ million first year