V NEWS

Tony Bugge, Director of Sales APAC at V Net comments, “The V Insights solution has been specifically designed to foster collaboration; focussing on each key business objective shared between the retailer and their supplier. The introduction of this system will give these suppliers clarity around which actions have been successful and what is required to improve business performance.”

Tony Bugge, Director of Sales APAC at V Net explains, “What makes us unique to the dime-a-dozen Business Intelligence Tools in the marketplace is our ability to create a platform that becomes the conduit between retailer and trading partner. The dashboards are specifically designed to measure each of the key business objectives between retailer and vendor, but more importantly, they allow for dynamic navigation that highlights the success or missed opportunities within that strategy. This allows the Buyer and Vendor Sales Executive to walk out of their business reviews with clarity around what actions are required to improve business performance.”

The success of this program will lead to an accelerated roll-out plan for other key V Net trading partners.

Tony Bugge, Director of Sales APAC for V Net explains, “The physical books category is making a resurgence, so the challenge put to V Net was to help introduce a core range of 1,200 SKUs that could be replenished on a weekly basis.”

The results were immediate, with a double digit sales growth on last year being driven by a disciplined replenishment process that filled shelves based on consumer demand by SKU at a store level.

The success of this program will lead to the roll-out of V Category to other departments with similar operational inefficiencies.

Proving to be a real challenge for this multi-national company was the need to effectively manage their demand planning across multiple product categories with diverse decay curves. The unsatisfactory on-shelf availability rates were a derivative of poor planning and forecasting processes, resulting in missed sales opportunity.

Tony Bugge, Director of Sales APAC for V Net explains, “V CPFR has allowed our client to implement fully integrated, global store inventory management system. A vendor portal provides both the vendor and retailer with one platform to develop strategies and objectives, allowing an easy way to identify missed opportunities. The forecasting tools also provide our client with the ability to build a 13-week demand plan by SKU.”

The success of this program has led to the roll-out of V CPFR in other parts of Asia including Japan.

The solution has been found in V Net Insights that has not only armed the buyers and planners with access to daily sales, margin and inventory insights, but also provided users with an interactive mechanism to very quickly identify missed opportunities to improve their respective business units.

Sanjeev Balasubramaniam, GM of Business Development at V Net comments, “The scalability of the rigid environment within the V Insights platform allowed us to import 104 weeks of daily data for sales and inventory. This atomic level data was then aggregated to create a data model that would provide the buyers and planners with the flexibility to dive into their respective business unit information via custom built dashboards.”

The results have been instantaneous with all users now able to make important product, placement and promotional decisions based on real time data.

Remo Barducci, Director of Client Services APAC at V Net commented, “Being a strategic partner with one of Australia’s leading consumer electronics retailers allows V Net to have an intimate understanding of their value proposition. We understood how important the execution of an accelerated growth plan for Small Appliances was to their business strategy for 2016 and beyond, and so we commissioned V Inventory to manage their small appliances category. The flexibility of our solution and the ability to create daily replenishment orders that were based on the most recent sales and inventory data at a store and SKU level, assisted in a successful core range roll-out to over 150 stores. ”

The results were immediate and sustainable growth was demonstrated. The successful implementation of V Inventory has led to the review of other high growth categories that may benefit from this solution in the very near future.

V-Net’s GM, Business Development, Sanjeev B explains “Using V-Net CPFR the V-Net team was able to facilitate a functioning CPFR model between the supplier and the retailer. Firstly, V-Inventory was implemented to ensure that consumer demand was accurately forecasted. This was achieved using a combination of V-Net’s demand algorithms and the work of our inventory experts in facilitating planning collaboration between the supplier and retailer on the impact that upcoming activity would have on demand and stock levels.

Then V-Net CPFR was able to bring to together this demand, orders, shipments and store receipts to report on the gaps between the retailer’s commitment to purchase, required stock and the suppliers’ ability to manufacture and provide stock.

The results identified on average $260k in additional stock orders over Buyer and Account Manager forecast to meet consumer demand. V-Net also Identified order fulfilment gaps on a weekly basis highlighting on average $2m missed each week on requested stock

These gaps were analysed and changes were made the forecast horizon to accommodate vendor manufacturing constraints

Subsequently, the on shelf availability increased by 5.9% and sales rose by 19.05%, improving stock turns from 3.8 to 5.2 within a period of four months.

The success of this program has led to other global consumer electronics vendors rolling out V-CPFR to gain similar efficiencies and improvements”.

Ben Sammut, V-Net Team Leader comments “The vendors that provide the adult colouring titles work on a first come first served basis. With the implementation of V-Net, the buyer was in a position to take the remainder of stock available from the vendor’s warehouse. Once reprints landed at the vendor, the retail partner was also in a position to act on the available stock first and thus their stock was first on the truck out of the warehouse. This was only possible due to V-Net’s capability of generating orders within an hour and transmitting to the vendor quickly, as opposed to internal systems which take 24 hours at a minimum.”

The result of this was a jump in market share on this emerging category. Where the retailer typically held 13% of the total market sales, they were able to hold a 27% market share on adult colouring. The initial sales have continued, delivering a consistently above average market share to this leading book retailer as customers now see this retailer as one that can provide stock availability.

Ben Sammut, V Net Team Leader, explains “By engaging close communication with the publishers & distributors, as well as the internal buying team, the V Net team were able to expand the 50 closely managed sku’s to over 2000. By utilising seasonal trends, advertising forecasts and customised replenishment algorithms these lines were maintained at manageable stock levels to ensure sales were maximised while returns were minimised”.

The results were immediate. The initial orders landed in store with the on shelf availability increased to 99%. The stores were now in a position to merchandise stock effectively, which resulted in the below after 3 months:

Sales went from -15% v LY to +10%. Meaning a 25% increase in sales

The retailer gained market share, increasing by 2.61%

Although stock holding was increased, sales were increased at a greater rate, equating to a stock turns increasing from 3.22 to 3.36 per year.

The successful results within books has provided V-Net with a launch pad into other difficult to manage categories within this Discount Department Store environment.

Remo Barducci, Director Client Services APAC at V-Net explains “The internal replenishment system and staff at this DDS retailer were not working closely with the vendors on replenishment, forecasting and stock availability. This resulted in orders being placed and stuck in the system where the vendor didn’t have stock, many orders went as low as 50% DIFOT. This resulted in an 85% ISP, and sales dropping 15% on last year’s figures. In May of 2015 V-Net solutions were consulted to work through the problem, and bring results back to expectations.”

V-Net facilitated tight communications and forecasting of future orders so the vendors could maintain sufficient warehouse stock. This resulted in an immediate jump to 99% ongoing ISP, and over 6 months sales have increased to 3% above last year’s figures.

A pilot program testing the impact of V Inventory with a major film studio and a major consumer electronics retailer was commissioned.

V Net’s Director Sales APAC, Tony Bugge, commented “The pilot program was a huge success. The major improvements in processes were derived from the following key initiatives;

1. Graded all stores with a product range in line with consumer demographics of location.
2. The replenishment orders for all stores run twice a week using model stock numbers creating by our solution based on most recent daily sales and up to date inventory levels.
3. The allocation of new release and campaign lines using our benchmarking process ensured the stock weight of these products were in line with consumer demand for each outlet.
4. A V Net specialist was placed on site at the retailer store support centre, allowing them to collaborate with the buyer, planner and key account executive.

The results provided an On Shelf Availability improvement of 27% to 97.6%. This led to a 32% year on year sales improvement for the pilot vendor!”

The success of the pilot program has led to all film distributors being rolled out within the retail environment.

V Net is now the industry standard with 98% of all Filmed Entertainment products being managed by V Inventory.”