The basic concepts of selling goods or services directly to consumers or end-users might seem less complicated in theory but if you ask a retail giant like V-Mart about what goes behind successfully delivering products to consumers or end-users, the answer will surely not be as simple as you’d expect.
That’s because there are a variety of steps to be performed at different stages of a supply chain process in the retail business and one such crucial section is Replenishment and Allocation. This is a segment of business that comprises planning, ordering, and distributing inventory in order to fulfill customer demands. Again, this might seem like a simple procedure but when the scale of business is huge in size, manually following all the processes of the supply chain doesn’t seem like the best idea. Such was also the case with V-Mart.
V-Mart is a retail giant in India with a diverse portfolio of products from apparel to FMCG. It is the one-stop family shop that serves its huge customer base with the true value for money. With over 228 stores in the country, the retailer serves FMCG products in nearly 50 to 60 of its stores. And the demand and inventory planning for its FMCG products is successfully conducted through our solution, DigiARS.
Must Read: How Supplymint Transformed V-Mart’s Procurement Journey
Understanding the importance of an automated solution for Supply Chain Management like ours and acknowledging the benefits of the same, V-Mart was on board with the idea to transform its slow-paced and error-prone methods of demand and inventory planning.
How Supplymint Transformed Demand and Inventory Planning
Supplymint is a single cloud-based supply chain management platform that connects all the key players of the retail industry through its platform. It simplifies the flow of all supply chain activities and simultaneously provides advanced analytics that enhances the overall retail experience.
For retailers, Supplymint simplifies procuring goods through diverse vendor catalogs, raises and tracks purchase orders, manages multiple vendor relationships, and optimizes inventory management.
Introducing DigiARS
A powerful module of Supplymint, DigiARS is a software that focuses on digitally planning demand and managing inventory so as to help retailers and wholesalers in presenting their customers with exactly what they want and where they want it. It’s a solution that ensures an optimum rate of sales and controls all chances of wastage in the inventory and forecasting processes, with AI and ML-powered analytics.
How V-Mart’s Manual Demand and Inventory Planning Transformed with Supplymint
Data Management
Right at the beginning of V-Mart’s journey with DigiARS, our solution first corrected V-Mart’s manual input data which had nearly 25-35% errors. Although it was a lengthy process, our team at Supplymint corrected over 40 to 45 lakhs of line items only to get all details right and to bring a better experience. From thereon, our solution further took care of their data integration with real-time push to ERP.
Interesting Read: The Future of Supply Chain Technology
Minimum Base Quantity
Once the data was all corrected, our team set up a solution for V-Mart in a careful manner so as to help the retailer in maintaining MBQs in all their stores, along with other strategic replenishment, assortment, and allocation strategies. And like we said earlier, DigiARS is an automation solution. This means that once our solution was delivered, V-Mart didn’t manually need anyone to constantly think and plan on how to maintain MBQs. However, they did authorize personnel to change MBQs from time to time and our system handled the rest of the planning.
Visibility of Stock and Store Capacity Management
With manual inventory planning, the biggest deficit for any company, let alone V-Mart, is that it can never facilitate the process with all the correct details. Rather, it is lengthy, time and cost consuming, and prone to human errors. To eliminate the risk of stockouts, and to manage their store capacity in a better manner, V-Mart began using DigiARS which helped them in receiving real-time updates of all their inventories whether it was at the warehouse or in transit.
Automated Reports and Analytics
Before their use of DigiARS, V-Mart had resources to manually generate a variety of daily and weekly reports like the status of GRC, sales report, returns, etc. Not only was this too much of an effort, but also not accurate and reliable due to chances of corruption or error in data. This also changed with DigiARS that made the process much more transparent. Now the teams at V-Mart simply need to surf through our portal, filter search, and get all results in real-time. Along with this, they also have the feature to generate complex analytics which gives them crucial insights that helps them in growing their business.
Revenue Growth
With the elimination of dead inventory and cost reductions and the addition of accurate demand planning, the rate of sales for V-Mart’s products shot up. Thus, bringing a significant rise in the company’s revenue growth. With V-Mart’s aim to fulfill customer demands, and with close attention to customer experience, DigiARS helped them in getting the right products, at the right place, at the right time.
The Ease of Using DigiARS for Demand and Inventory Planning
Finding solutions to such challenges, V-Mart attained an opportunity to leverage the following benefits of DigiARS that now make demand and inventory planning easier for them.
Partnering with Supplymint in 2018, V-Mart began its journey with Supplymint with the use of our DigiProc solution that enabled them to digitally create and maintain purchase indents and purchase orders along with other procurement communications and activities like approvals, etc. Once they successfully managed to grow through our platform, they pursued their interest in digitizing their demand and inventory planning processes with DigiARS by the end of 2019. This has led the retail giant in accessing the two most powerful supply chain tools that have the ability to sustain a retail business with maximized profits.
The Supplymint Spirit
Our Team at Supplymint always has one question, “How can we make your supply chain management better?” We listen. We advise. We design. And everything that we do, we do it to make it better for you. We’re delighted to be a part of V-Mart’s exceptional supply chain management growth and continue to support them in all their future endeavors.