Warehouse Logistics

Retail Warehouse Logistics involves a wide range of operations related to the supply chain and the life cycle of the stock, from the moment it leaves the factory and arrives at the warehouse, until it is displayed and sold at a physical or online point of sale.

What is retail warehouse logistics?

Some key aspects of logistics include supply chain optimization, inventory management, efficient warehousing and distribution, technology and automation, and returns management.

Efficient logistics is a determining factor for a business to achieve success in the retail sector. Incorrect planning and distribution of stock coverage between points of sale can increase costs through unnecessary carryovers, as well as incurring lost sales and stock outs.

Next we will focus on the logistics process and supply chain operations, and how to optimize it to increase efficiency.

How Artificial Intelligence helps you manage the supply chain

Depending on whether our objective is to prepare and plan an inventory before the sales season, or to manage the warehouse stock on a day-to-day basis, we can carry out different operations to make the processes more efficient.

Planning and managing logistics operations in your warehouses with Artificial Intelligence has numerous advantages, among them:

• Stores clustering by consumption and sales trends to have a global vision.
• Anticipate demand with the algorithm’s predictions and avoid sales disruptions.
• Optimize your transfers between stores saving logistics costs and time
• Guarantee minimum coverage without overloading your outlets
• Avoid stock outs and give your stock a second chance with an effective returns policy

Advantages of planning your retail warehouse logistics

If you have some margin time before launching your products for sale in your physical or online stores, here are some functions you can perform in your supply chain to save logistics costs.

Some of the functions that AI can help you with in logistics are:

Store clustering:

Here you can group your stores according to consumption patterns, trends, location or other factors that help you to parameterize and structure your commercial strategy.

Once this grouping is determined, you will be able to automate operations and have an overview by assortment or grouping, by product category and much more. In this way, you can place new purchase orders and replenishments through centralized transfers to save logistics costs.

Is your strategy changing? Readjust these store clusters by adapting them to your strategy through performance predictions. You will be able to see which assortment performs best and make decisions accordingly

Design Variation Planning

In line with the previous functionality, Design Variation planning will allow you to know the right moment to introduce new products in each cluster, thus improving coverage.

Thanks to the previous groupings of your points of sale, you will have suggestions that optimize horizontality and distribution, allowing you to achieve your objectives without generating surpluses or cannibalization. Again, by anticipating changes in demand in advance, you will be able to better organize your logistics operations.

Forget about storing stock that is not sold, and if it is sold, don’t let it affect the performance of other products on sale.

Assortment Plan

This aspect may not be intrinsically related to the supply chain, but since it affects logistics efficiency, we believe it is worth mentioning it here.

By generating assortment plan proposals, artificial intelligence selects the limited budget in terms of assortment and distributes it among the different stock categories and stores, focusing on those that will perform best in the next period.

Avoid unnecessary carryovers and replenishments if you have a limited budget. Get the most out of it and achieve a secure sale with ROIvolution’s demand forecasts.

And if you decide to change your commercial strategy, ROIvolution adapts to you and readjusts your assortment plan so you can instantly make the optimal decisions to increase your retail sales.

Shopping lists

By configuring supplier shopping lists, you will be able to prioritize new orders based on performance, sales, margins, and more. This way you will save on unnecessary purchases by focusing on the sales that give you the best performance, saving unnecessary costs.

Click here if you want to know more about how artificial intelligence helps you plan your purchases from suppliers.

If you want to know the rest of the functionalities of our inventory planning module you can find here the rest of the functions.

Advantages of managing your retail warehouse logistics

If, on the other hand, you have to manage the day-to-day logistics and supply chain operations of your business, the In-Season inventory management module is what you need.

Replenishment proposal

Time to anticipate new orders! With this functionality you will be able to anticipate and automate your stock replenishment operations in your stores.

Thanks to the automatic purchase order calculation, you will be able to detect those products that, with the current and pending stock, will not be able to guarantee coverage for the expected sales, so stock-outs will be a thing of the past.

Transfers

What if I told you that ROIvolution, before proposing a new order to suppliers due to lack of coverage, decides to see if that product is available in another location and is not going to be sold?

Well, you would save a lot, a lot of money and time. And not only in the time dedicated to place the order, organize it and receive it, but also in the logistic cost, fuels, and others.

In addition, you will be able to avoid stock accumulation in underperforming stores by relocating stock to more profitable locations.

Within the transfers we find different functions:

• Customized transfers:

Automate the operation of your transfers with a management that guarantees the extinction of toxic stock and the reduction of sales losses. Maintain the RVM in the face of different transfers: of necessity, without size breakage or concentration.

• Replenishment by forecast

Receives automated warehouse-to-store replenishment calculations. Takes into account projected demand levels, based on historical and trend data, plus different service lead times, defined coverage, VM criteria and other aspects.

• Shortage replenishment

In this functionality of the In-season module, the algorithm optimizes and anticipates resource shortages, automatically assigning reception priority according to the projected sales velocity.

Cannibalization

If your products sell, it doesn’t always have to be a good thing.

And we’ll tell you why; if you have a product A that has an average yield but a high margin, and a product B with a high yield but a very low margin, you may have increased your sales in quantitative terms, but you may fall into the trap of cannibalization.

If you detect that some of your products are losing sales to other new products with similar characteristics, you may be suffering from cannibalization.

To avoid this “friendly fire”, ROIvolution offers you recommendations and alerts to avoid this cannibalization and to prevent your products from stepping on each other’s toes.

In this way, if you suffer from this problem, the artificial intelligence will offer you solutions for these products such as transfers, groupings or promotions, among other functions.

Stock outs alert

When faced with the dreaded stock-outs of a product or assortment, the system has an alert that detects the possibility of suffering a loss of sales in the coming weeks due to lack of stock, allowing proactivity in purchasing decisions.

Grouping new orders or redistributing stock from other stores to save on purchasing and logistics costs.

Store capacity monitoring

This functionality, closely related to all the management at the point of sale, will allow you to monitor the total capacity of your stores and warehouses, taking into account your business rules and the spatial volume of your stores, advising the quantity and the category or assortment of products that will have the best performance.