Strategic use of data has delivered powerful solutions and competitive advantages to for individuals, organizations, and industries for years.
While data can be valuable to a company, many are unclear on the type of data to collect or how it can help them answer questions, make informed decisions, or achieve goals.
Throughout January, tED magazine is sharing the inspiring stories of companies that solved a unique problem through the intelligent use of gathering and analyzing data.
Data-Driven Solutions: Relocating Unproductive Inventory
Earlier this month, tED magazine provided a solution from an NAED distributor who was able to move unproductive inventory more efficiently to capitalize on investment dollars. Read more
Data-Driven Solutions: Automating Calculations of Market Share
And, we showed you a solution for speeding up and creating a more accurate report on its market share to uncover valuable information. Read more
Data-Driven Solutions: Boosting Profitability
We also showed you how one distributor used data to examine pricing and boost profitability. Read more
Company Problem: With limited information on size and weight of incoming products, the process of slotting these products in the company’s warehouse shelves wasn’t optimized.
Data-Driven Solution: The formal collection of weights and dimensions of all products within a new database better aligned available shelf space with current inventory and eased the truck-loading process.
Optimizing limited shelf space represents good management at a distributorship, but it wasn’t always possible for one distributor, which had to rely on guestimates of the size of products comingintotheirwarehouseandevaluationsbyeyetomatchthemtoavailableshelves. Since undertaking an initiative to collect weights and dimensions of all products combined with their sales data, however, the company now knows exactly how much shelf space they need for every item in their warehouse.
“Because many manufacturers don’t have great weight and dimension data, we used to add a percentage to account for packaging and cardboard weight, but we had interns measure and weigh everything with a camera, tape measure, scale, or cubic scanner and input that data into our system so that we could optimize our slotting and right-size a shelf to an item or juggle material around to create open space for new items,” shared their data specialist of an initiative championed by supply chain leaders and executed by their sales analysts. “The system additionally predicts if sales of an item are exploding and we’ll need more space and also helps with delivery by determining if a particular truck has the space for certain items before we start loading it.”
In the future, the company also plans to use this data to verify its pick quantities based on their actual weight versus what that quantity should weigh according to the system, which will help to identify quantity variances and even resolve billing disputes. “In the end, data can help you answer questions you weren’t even thinking about when you first started collecting it,” the data specialist said. “You can do everything better with data.”
You can learn about more Data-Driven Solutions, or NAED member companies can download the full report for free on NAED’s “Making Strides With Data Insights” page at https://www.naed.org/making-strides-with-data-insights
Tagged with best practices, data, NAED