Lama Group. Automation of the order of goods in shops of retail chain stores

Project History

The progressive tense inventory management of Lama network was completely based on orders of merchandisers in shops. The quality of inventory management at such scheme formation of orders had a number of shortcomings:

• the quality of the order of goods completely was defined by professionalism of the merchandiser – in shops with bad merchandisers there was a deficit of tradables or, on the contrary, recasing of warehouse separate, not saleable articles more often;
• in spite of the fact that good merchandisers are capable to create effectively orders, capabilities even of the experienced merchandiser are limited and in practice qualitative orders formed for most tradables, and other nomenclature was ordered with the worst quality;
• often there were errors from carelessness. As a result the necessary goods were just "forgotten" to be ordered occasionally.

With development of network and toughening of the competition from new players of the market, the retail chain stores Lama were forced to optimize efficiency of network, and one of priorities became inventory management quality improvements. For the solution of above-mentioned problems of formation of the order it was decided to automate as much as possible this process and to implement the Management system of stocks based on forecasting of consumer demand.

Approach basis

For automation of process of management of stocks the Forecsys company suggested to use own specialized solution of Goods4Cast.

The Goods4Cast system uses rich library of prediction algorithms and allows to select automatically the best forecasting model for each combination goods shop.

Thanks to feature of implementation of prediction algorithms, the solution Goods4Cast allows to calculate optimum level of safety stocks. The optimality of the inventory level is reached by means of functionality of the quality estimating ratios between risks of the fluctuation in demand and cost of storage costs of an additional remaining balance in shop.

Functional characteristics

The solution Goods4Cast is used by the separate server on which the internal database of a system and auxiliary OLAP cubic is set.

At the request of the accounting system of retail chain stores there is a shortchanging of forecasts and calculation of orders for the next deliveries of goods to shops. Calculation results come to the accounting system of retail chain stores.

Synchronization of data between the Goods4Cast system and the accounting system of retail chain stores happens daily.

System performance

System performance is 150-200 thousand forecasts per hour. The configuration of the server and a system are picked specially up so that from 0:00 a.m. till 3 a.m. to carry out synchronization of data with the accounting system of network to the period and after that to manage to process till 7 a.m. about 500-700 thousand more forecasts.

Effect of system implementation

Based on trial operation, due to use of the Goods4Cast System, was dostingnuto significant improvement of key indicators of quality of inventory management: the commodity remaining balance decreased by 9%, the level of service in shops grew from 90 to 95%.

Besides it was succeeded to reduce wage fund (due to significant automation of process of formation of orders in shops).