The Supply Chain and Inventory Planning Blog

You may be wondering what exactly a planner does with their time, besides the obvious planning. Put simply, your main responsibility as a planner is to order the right amount of inventory, at the right time. But in order to do this, you must put in place and manage quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily processes consisting of pre-season, in-season, and post-season planning and analysis. In other words, no two days are the same!

1. Check Your Emails

Pour yourself a large cup of coffee and get ready for the day ahead! Because your role as a planner is integral to the connectedness of the organization, it’s important to stay up to date on all relevant information from the teams you bridge. This means staying on top of what your Finance, Supply Chain, and Marketing teams are requesting or sharing with you.  

2. Know Your Sales

While you’re probably naturally curious and want to know how you’re performing, having a pulse on performance will also help you with the day’s decisions and ensure others you are well informed. Trust is a fundamental component of any Planner’s relationship with their team and knowing what your sales are is a key part of building it. Stay on top of performance highlights, wins and losses, and you’ll be sure to leave a good impression!

3. Manage Your Inventory

A big part of planning is having a good handle on where your inventory lives. This means staying on top of deliveries and any shifts in receipts, stock levels, and any other inventory records that may impact sales and performance. This time may be spent running and analyzing reports, asking and answering your own questions, and most importantly, taking note of anything that will impact product planning.

4. Forecast

Alas, you have the most up to date information to influence your planning strategy and projected sales. Now’s the time to put these learnings into effect. This is the part of your day spent in any systems and/or excel models used to forecast demand and inventory needs. While this may be among the most time consuming of the day’s activities, it is undeniably the most important.  

5. Submit Your Handoffs

Similar to how you start the day making sure you’re up to date on everything, you typically end the day ensuring anything that may impact others is shared in the appropriate manner. Once you’ve cleaned everything off your plate, spend some time planning the rest of your week and making sure all monthly and quarterly to-do’s are being taken care of as well. 

Enjoy the Ride

Being a planner truly is an exciting role. You get to work with every part of the business, buy products, and watch mathematically backed guesses unfold. Not only do you forecast inventory needs and performance, you’ll be on top of both short term and long term business planning as well. A great practice to make the ride as smooth as possible is ensuring information is up to date and accessible to others, asking questions, and staying curious! 

At this point, you may be wondering, “Are planners superheroes, too? How is all of this done in one day?” The short answer is, it won’t always be. That’s where Fuse comes in. Our goal is to help simplify the inventory planning process and make a Planner’s role easier. We take out the grunt work from these tasks so that you can focus on the big picture. Less day-to-day, more accomplishment-to-accomplishment. 

While the two go together like peanut butter and jelly, there are key differences between the role of a Buyer and that of a Planner. For instance: 

• The Planner determines the right order quantity and order time whereas the Buyer determines the right selling quantity and selling time. 
• In some cases, the Buyer is also responsible for making sure the business has the right product, in the right place, at the right price. 

In any case, it’s important to note that Buyers and Planners must work together, challenge each other, and ultimately align on what’s best for the business. 

So what exactly are the main differences? 

1. Working with Marketing

The main difference between a Buyer and Planner as they work with Marketing is that a Buyer provides information to Marketing whereas a Planner receives information. Since a Buyer’s responsibility is determining the selling quantity, their objective is to sell products as effectively as possible. This means providing the Marketing team with product strategy to optimize selling. Explaining who the products were purchased for and why can help inform the marketing strategy.

A Planner, on the other hand, is a recipient of this strategy. Their objective is to understand the outputs that will impact future demand so that the right order quantity can be determined for a later point in time.

2. Working with Supply Chain

Similar to the relationship mentioned above, Buyers are often providing information in the earlier part of the supply chain whereas Planners are often receiving information in the latter. A Buyer may work with the team on the development or procurement of goods, whereas the Planner is more involved from the stages of PO placement to receipt. 

Put simply, a Buyer is responsible for product records such as vendors and costs, whereas a Planner is responsible for inventory records such as receipts and timing of ownership. 

3. Analyzing the Business

While both will dive deeply into understanding the business, a Buyer will most often speak to top sellers and the result of marketing efforts on product sales, whereas a Planner will go further into category insights, comparison to forecasts, and monitoring inventory. 

This process is one where the two roles must work the closest together to best understand the business.

4. Using Data

While the data both Buyers and Planners read to understand performance may be similar, a key difference is that Buyers are more focused on data related to the future and upcoming trends whereas Planners are more focused on past demand and historical sales.

5. Organizational Structure 

Because their worlds overlap so much, you’ll often see a Buyer and Planner by each other’s side. However, they may technically sit under separate teams. A Buyer will often sit under a function that oversees revenue, such as Sales or Marketing. On the other hand, a Planner may sit on a team that oversees inventory and budgets, such as Finance. This separation helps ensure there are healthy challenges across interests, thus supporting what’s best for the overall business. 

Two Peas in a Pod

The synergy of Buyer and Planner is integral to the success of any organization. While the Buyer focuses on who, what, why and where in order to build a top down approach, the Planner focuses on how much and when to build a bottoms up logic to eventually align at the optimal level. 

Fuse helps align these two forecasting methodologies systematically so that less time is spent on the nitty gritty, and more time can be spent on building the best relationship and strategies for the business.   

This year’s Amazon Prime Day was record breaking generating $1 bn in sales. Not only did Amazon beat it’s own Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, but sales also increased 60% year over year relative to last year’s Prime Day. Amazon continues to dominate e-commerce and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. But, as we said in our previous post, we definitely believe that there is room in the market for digitally native brands to succeed. They just need to compete on a different dimension rather than trying to beat Amazon at the game that it’s mastered - convenience.

As Amazon continues to grow and dominate, we think that Amazon Prime Day has valuable lessons for growing brands that they can apply to their own business models successfully.

1. The membership model works really really well if you’re fulfilling a real need

While subscriptions of one sort or another have long been in vogue for ecommerce companies, not all of these companies have been successful over the long-term. This year, a record number of customers signed up for Prime Day, demonstrating that the membership or subscription model can work really well, but it needs to have several key components. Namely that the benefits have to be unique, exclusive and drive significant value to the customer. 

The thing that makes Prime Day so special is that it is available to only Amazon Prime members. Most e-commerce subscription providers tend to provide a subscription for the sake of stabilizing their own revenue and cash flow and not necessarily because they offer something unique, exclusive and valuable to the customer. 

That being said, companies like Stitch Fix and Dia & Co. have been successful because they provide exactly that. In the case of a company like Dia, they’re meeting an untapped market need for plus size clothing and have a unique offering in a space where there’s a clear market gap. Literally the perfect use case for a membership model. 

2.  Don’t be afraid to run experiments

In a way, Prime Day is one big experiment for Amazon. The company has used it to test new product lines and releases or supply chain innovations with the focus shifting slightly each year. Once it becomes clear what worked and what didn’t, Amazon can use the plethora of data to improve throughout the remainder of the year. 

While most e-commerce brands do have a strong ethic of A/B testing whether it’s landing pages, marketing copy or other initiatives, it can be hard to run potentially game changing experiments and take big risks as a small company. But, that being said, what Amazon and other successful e-commerce players like Jet have taught us is that big bets can pay off. In an ecosystem where retail continues to be challenged, those who innovate successfully and take bold steps to reinvent their business models even when they seem to be working will be the ones who come out on top. 

3. Make sure your supply chain and logistics are in order before ramping up marketing

While in the past Amazon has had some technical snafus related to Prime Day, the company has certainly succeeded in making sure everything went smoothly this year. While Amazon has a particular strength in supply chain and logistics, the lessons from its past technical malfunctions can teach smaller brands a thing or two.

Similar to the Amazon example, you don’t want to spend a ton of time, effort and money driving traffic to your site when that traffic can’t convert due to a shopping cart glitch (back in 2016), or, on the supply chain side, when you’re out of the inventory you’re advertising. At Fuse, one of the most common problems we encounter is a lack of coordination between the marketing and the supply chain teams. 

While marketing may launch a meticulously planned, omni-channel campaign, too often we find that these campaigns don’t take into account critical questions like if the campaign has the desired impact, can the company actually fulfill the orders? Will there be enough inventory to satisfy demand? While it seems obvious in hindsight, it usually takes a crisis or two for e-commerce brands to streamline the coordination between functions. 

As your company grows and scales and focuses on putting these lessons into practice, Fuse is here to help you focus on your business, not your inventory.

Are you an Inventory Planner? Have you ever tried to explain to your friends or coworkers what you do and had a hard time getting them to really get it?

Are you a business owner building a brand who’s been told that you should hire a planner? Have you wondered to yourself, ‘why?’ and ‘what would she help me with?’

If you fall into either of these two buckets, this post is for you! If you’re an underappreciated planner, we hope you can send this to your friends and coworkers so that they truly understand how much you contribute to your company. If you’re a business owner who’s new to ops but wants to scale, we hope we can persuade you to get an inventory planner before you run into a major operational crisis like stocking out of your top selling SKUs.

First, let’s start with some basic definitions. Inventory planners help companies:

1. Determine how much inventory they need to order. 

Just like Goldilocks, growing businesses need just the right amount of inventory to survive. Order too little and you risk stocking out, damaging your credibility with your customers and harming your brand. Order too much and you can wind up with hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars of wasted inventory. The capital you invested may be permanently lost, crippling you from investing in other critical business initiatives like products that are selling well or marketing to attract new customers. Inventory planners do a complex optimization exercise every year, quarter, month and even week to make sure that just the right amount of inventory across all products has been ordered.

2. Determine when the inventory needs to arrive.

It’s not enough to simply order enough inventory, but the inventory planner’s role is also to make sure that it arrives when it’s needed. If a company has a three month lead time, discovering that more inventory is needed the week before isn’t helpful. Conversely, if the inventory will sell through eventually but is just sitting in the company’s warehouse for six months, that capital could certainly have been put to better use. Timing is a critical piece of the planning equation.

3. Aligning with sales and marketing. 

Marketing and sales are always trying to drive business. A critical input into planning are questions like “what promos are we running this month?” and “what big wholesale accounts do we expect to win next year?” Inventory planners work closely with marketing and sales to make sure that there is the right amount of product to support and prepare for the big wins expected to come from these initiatives. In prior blog posts, we’ve highlighted the importance of coordinating with operations if you’re in sales or marketing. 

So, why are Inventory Planners important?

Well, we hope that after reading our definitions, the picture all starts to come together. Yet, the unfortunate reality remains that inventory planning remains one of the most misunderstood and least appreciated functions at growing brands. 

So, here’s what we think. Inventory is either the #1 or #2 investment that companies make. If it’s #2, it’s second only to marketing. An investment this big, if not managed properly, can and has been the cause of failure. The less capital you have to play with, the more important it is to optimize that investment. While there is a lot to be done downstream in the supply chain, and we’ve highlighted this in our post on 7 supply chain questions you need to answer, the best optimization on the fulfilment side can’t help you if you’ve ordered the wrong amount of inventory. Because of this, the person who plans your inventory - makes sure you’re investing enough and makes sure it’s coming in on time - is one of the most important people in your company and one of the earliest roles all consumer brands should hire for early on. 

Whether you’re an inventory planner with decades of experience or a start-up founder who’s just coming to grips with the importance of operations and inventory, Fuse is here to help you focus on your business, not your inventory.

Over the past year, we’ve learned that many young companies are financing their inventory completely the wrong way. What’s the wrong way to finance inventory? With venture capital funding. 

Why you don’t need VC funding for your brand

First and foremost, unless you have a completely new business model (like Dollar Shave Club or Birchbox when they were first starting out) or something else that’s extremely innovative about the brand you’re building, venture capital funding is probably not right for you. If you do take VC funding, it should be used exclusively to drive your business’ hiring and marketing needs. These are important investments in growth and worth selling a piece of your company for. But, given that there are many other ways to finance your inventory, selling a big chunk of your company to do so doesn’t make any sense. 

At this point, you might be asking yourself, well if I can’t use venture funding, what should I do? Here are three options:

1. Your Suppliers and Manufacturers

Our advisor, Lisa Hom, who’s starting a new brand called Kaleido Concepts and has been an executive at multiple $100 mm+ brands, plans to finance her inventory by, “...getting creative when working with manufactures and suppliers. It all comes down to cash flow. The strategy should be to pay your manufacturers for the goods after you sell them. I asked a manufacturer for terms of net 120 days, meaning that I didn't have to pay him for the goods until 120 days after he shipped the product.  So it gave me 90 days to sell it and not have to pay for the goods out of my cash.”

While it may take a bit of leverage to get that type of accommodation from a supplier, most founders don’t even know that they can ask. Many manufacturers feel that they are falling behind and are eager to partner with founders who can educate them on the world of e-commerce. When starting a new brand, you need to talk to suppliers from a place of strength, so getting creative about what your strengths are is super valuable. Moreover, we’ve seen several start-ups partner with their supplier by letting them take an equity stake in the company. Not only does it give you capital, but it also completely aligns your incentives.

2. A Letter of Credit

Now that you’re in business and actually have sales, you can go get a letter of credit from a bank. The letter of credit will demonstrate to your suppliers that you will be able to pay them. This letter of credit not only allows you to purchase more inventory than you otherwise could, but it also allows you to negotiate better payment terms with your suppliers. Now that you have more inventory, you can drive higher sales, increase the amount guaranteed by the bank, buy even more inventory and do it all over again. So long as the inventory is selling, you’ll continue to be able to use this approach to finance your business.

3. Inventory Factoring

Finally, although inventory factoring sometimes gets a bad name, there are great companies like Dwight Funding, who are revolutionizing the world of inventory factoring and taking a modern approach to working with young companies. Inventory factoring is when a company takes on debt to finance inventory against its future sales or accounts receivable. This can be especially effective when you work with large retailers like Sephora, Nordstrom and others that commit to purchasing large amounts of product for the upcoming season well in advance. These receivables can be leveraged to get a loan in order to be able to buy the inventory that will support these large contracts. 

What do you need to be successful?

If you pursue these strategies, you need to maintain trust with the third parties you work with by forecasting your demand and inventory needs accurately. If you’re unable to pay your supplier because you’ve vastly overestimated the sellthru rate of your inventory or your factoring partner can’t get a straight answer on what you expect this year, these partnerships won’t be successful. That’s where a tool like Fuse comes in to help you forecast demand and inventory more accurately. Planning inventory and getting it right is our bread and butter. As a scrappy start-up, our tool can help you gain leverage and continue to forecast easily and accurately as you grow your SKU count and monthly order volume without throwing more bodies at the problem. No matter how you choose to finance your inventory, Fuse is here to help you focus on your business, not your inventory.

After conducting almost 200 customer interviews, we’ve gained some insight into what separates the great from the good when it comes to inventory.

We started by asking our advisor, Oseyi Ikuenobe, the Senior Product Manager of @WalmartLabs’ Smart Forecasting product for his thoughts. At @WalmartLabs, Oseyi and a team of data scientists and engineers plans the inventory for Walmart’s $13 bn e-commerce business. 

Inventory management should have ROI benchmarks

According to Oseyi, "The best inventory strategy is one that allows you to buy the 'right amounts of the right inventory' to maximize revenue, profitability and growth. Instead of trying to simply control costs, it is better to think of inventory decisions the way we think of marketing spend - in terms of ROI. Once you have that mindset, you quickly realize that the ultimate smart inventory solution is one that can synthesize the collective wisdom of the organization and deploy it to drive decision making."

We’ve gleaned two insights from Oseyi’s thoughts:

1. Best-in-class retailers think about inventory as an investment, not a cost center
2. Collaboration between key functional areas is key to successful inventory planning

Reframing inventory as an investment

We work mostly with start-ups and all too often we see them allocating a fixed budget to inventory. But, inventory is an investment, much like marketing. The investment that a company makes in its inventory supports the company’s sales target. We’d propose that companies go through a series of questions to set their inventory budget:

1. What is our marketing budget?
2. Based on our marketing spend and our organic reach, what is our revenue target?
3. How much product do we need to sell to support our revenue target?

This third question is the start of the planning process. Once the revenue target is established, a planner can go through and make a determination regarding the product mix and volume of product needed. 

Collaboration improves inventory planning

The process described above only works if there is tight collaboration between all of the functional areas that impact sales like finance, marketing, merchandising and operations. 

Unfortunately, we have seen a lot of avoidable crises caused because one functional area forgot to tell operations about planned changes. Things like changing the discount amount on a promo or A/B tests planned on the site. While these lapses might seem small, they can have a big impact if there isn’t enough product in stock to support these initiatives.

So What?

We want to encourage our customers to reframe the way you think about inventory: it’s not your biggest cost center, it’s your biggest investment. At Fuse, we’re designing a tool to help automate the grunt work of planning so that you can focus on important, strategic decisions. 

We’re here to help you focus on your business, not your inventory.

At Fuse, we have the privilege of helping our customers enjoy their work more by providing an easy to use, beautifully designed inventory planning tool. As we’ve gotten to know our customers, we’ve been deeply impressed by how thoughtful, sharp and hard-working you are.

We’ve compiled data from over 150 customer interviews to send you one message: you’re not alone. In every single interview, our customers inevitably ask, “Are we the only ones using Excel and Google sheets?” 

The answer is no, you are absolutely not. You’re not alone. That’s exactly why we at Fuse decided to tackle the challenge of inventory planning and management head-on.

90% of customers manage inventory in Excel

Almost 90% of our customers manage their inventory in a combination of Excel and Google Sheets, while just under 10% have moved on to build a custom system -- a costly and lengthy process. Typically, companies start thinking about a custom system at the 100 SKU mark when they’ve pushed their existing Excel models to a breaking point. Excel is crashing on a daily basis and procurement is nearly impossible to track in Google Sheets. 

We asked Karan, Director of Ops at Boxed, a company bringing bulk wholesale shopping to mobile, why they built a custom system: “At Boxed, we needed backend inventory forecasting systems that were customized for our business model and flexible. We searched for a solution on the market and didn’t find anything that met our needs. This is why we chose to design something in-house.”

Custom inventory management systems have drawbacks

Of the companies we spoke to that have built a custom system, the top three reasons for building something in-house were not being able to find a system that meets their needs, not being able to afford existing systems and not wanting to spend a long time implementing an external solution.

Unfortunately, custom systems come with their own challenges. Most require at least one full-time engineer to maintain them, taking away valuable engineering talent from important product initiatives that could grow the business. This is exactly why most companies don’t devote a full-time engineer to maintaining their system. Inevitably, it fails to keep up with the growing organization’s needs and ultimately needs to be overhauled. 

Building a custom system is expensive. The companies we’ve spoken to have spent anywhere from $200,000 to over $1,000,000 just to build it, excluding the cost of ongoing maintenance. 

Fuse's mission is to change the frustrating status quo. Our favorite part of our job is talking to customers and improving your quality of life. Working at a fast-growing company is exciting and fun. We want to help you spend more time focusing on your business, not your inventory.

Supply chain is incredibly daunting, especially if you’re new to it. While it might seem confusing and complicated at first, you can tackle this complex field by breaking it down into a series of simple steps. 

1.       Choose Your Inventory Assortment

This is where your genius as a founder comes in. You know your customers best and you can use your judgement and qualitative insights to hone in on that next best thing. Of course, if there’s any data you can use to supplement your intuition (like what’s sold well in the past), we encourage you to do so!

We always recommend that young companies start with a simple assortment of SKUs. You can always add more as you grow, but it’s incredibly hard to manage a wide product assortment right out of the gate.

2.       Forecast Demand

This step is critical because you need to have an understanding of what sales of each product (down to the size and color level) will be. Without this analysis, you could wind up vastly over or under buying inventory. When you’re just starting out, it’s completely OK to use an Excel model. Hopefully, you’ve taken our advice and kept your product assortment simple, which will make it easier for you to forecast demand.

However, as you scale, there aren’t really any sophisticated tools out there to help you that don’t cost a small fortune. That’s why we created Fuse - to help algorithmically forecast demand at a price point that doesn’t break the bank.

3.       Size Your Inventory Buys

Once you’ve completed your demand forecast, you need to translate this data into an inventory buy and replenishment plan to make sure that you have enough inventory to fulfill expected demand. As a young company, you can’t afford to stock out - it disappoints customers and damages your brand.

To avoid stockouts, you want to link your demand forecast to the inventory you have on hand and the inventory you expect to receive from suppliers in the coming months. You need to order enough to make up for the gap between what you have on hand, what you expect to receive and how much you plan to sell. You’ll also need a bit of buffer just in case.

Many companies do this work in Excel, but Fuse can automate the whole process of translating your forecast to an order recommendation that’s consistent with your buying cycle.

4.       Track Your Purchase Orders

Now that you’ve placed your orders with your suppliers, you’ll need some sort of tracking system to track these POs. If there are delays or something arrives to the factory damaged, you’ll want to make sure to stay on top of it or else you may stock out.

Many companies use Google Sheets, but with Fuse’s PO module, Fuse has a simple way for you to seamlessly track your purchase orders. Unlike a google sheet, once the PO change is logged, we can seamlessly link it back to your current inventory position and demand forecast in order to give you a clear picture of what this means for your business.

5.       Track Your Inventory

Now you know that your inventory is somewhere between your supplier and your warehouse, but the question is, where? Is it on the boat, is it at the dock, is it in the warehouse? Flexport can help you track where your goods are. This type of tracking is critical because there may be delays at customs or in other parts of that shipping process that neither you nor your vendor can anticipate. Having visibility can help you make adjustments and communicate with your customers.

6.       Understand Your Inventory Position

Your inventory has arrived. Now, it’s critical to understand exactly how much of it you have and where it is. There are two possibilities - you can do it yourself at your own warehouse or you can work with a third party logistics provider (3PL). Most young companies choose to work with a 3PL rather than managing their own warehouse. With a 3PL provider like Quiet Logistics, you can completely outsource both the tracking and fulfillment piece of inventory management. While this might seem expensive, unless your core competency as a business or a founder is warehouse management, you may be better off outsourcing.

If you do choose to run and manage your own warehouse, you’ll need a warehouse management system like Fishbowl to help your employees in the warehouse know what’s where and also track goods as they come in. 

7.       Fulfill Your Orders

Finally, your products are in your warehouse and you’re ready to get products into the hands of customers. This is one of the most critical questions in the supply chain. There are two parts to this process - order management part and shipping and logistics.

On the order management side, there are many great systems out there like Stitch Labs that can help you make sure you’ve allocated the right amount of inventory to your e-commerce site, your retail store and your wholesale business. When you process an order from a customer on your website, you want to make sure that you have enough inventory to fulfill that order. You might have a lot of inventory on hand, but perhaps all of it is already allocated to your wholesale channel. These systems can also notify you when you’re running low. As your company grows, you may want to expand into more robust ERP systems like NetSuite. These types of systems are typically what people think of when they refer to an “inventory management system.”

Finally, the shipping and logistics piece is a whole separate beast. Smaller companies aren’t well resourced to do this, which is why a 3PL system can be extremely useful. Not only can they take care of your inbound goods, but they can also pack and ship goods to your customers. There are also new software providers like Shiphawk that can help you and your customers track where the shipment is. This piece is critically important because it’s how your customers will interact with you and your brand, so you want the experience - from packaging, to shipping, to tracking, to delivery - to be flawless. 

Staying sane

As a growing company, to stay sane, you need to take it one step at a time. There are some basic things you can do when you’re starting out to make life easier and help you succeed. First, find a 3PL provider you trust and rely on them to do the blocking and tackling. Second, while going into wholesale can seem attractive, you need to be careful about doing this early on. Working with retailers that are 1000x your size can be extremely challenging and time consuming, so you want to make sure to pick the right partner. Lastly, be thoughtful about how much inventory you buy and how you finance it. Making big mistakes early on can literally take down your company. 

We created Fuse to help companies transition from managing their demand forecasting and inventory planning process in Excel and Google Sheets to using sophisticated software. Start with Excel, but don’t stay there too long. As your business becomes more complex, mistakes become even more risky and costly. Make sure to invest in inventory planning software like Fuse to avoid drastically over or understocking. We’re here to help you focus on your business, not your inventory.

When we first started Fuse, we had several key hypotheses as to how we could improve the way inventory planning is done by retailers today. First, we were convinced that it’s impossible to plan a growing business in Excel. As the volume of data and the number of SKUs grow, it’s easy to make errors in Excel and, in fact, impossible not to when you’ve linked several spreadsheets and Excel is crashing mid-save. Excel’s capabilities are limited, and thus planners must rely on backward-looking metrics like sell-thru and historical growth rates, which don’t accurately paint a picture of their growing business. Second, an algorithm can better detect anomalies and accurately estimate seasonality than a human whose attention is divided amongst the many other urgent priorities of the day.

After working with our early customers for some time, we’re proud to say that both our hypotheses were correct -- we’ve found that the ROI of using Fuse makes a meaningful, material difference on both the revenue and the cost side.

10% More Revenue

On the revenue side, we’ve found that Fuse helps our customers achieve 10% more revenue. We did a deep dive into our customers’ biggest quarter - Q4. First, we took a look at stockouts in Q4. We defined a stockout as zero sales with 95% confidence. This means that we excluded instances in which zero sales could have legitimately meant no demand for the product. Second, we assumed that our customer’s revenue target for Q4 was equal to actual Q4 sales. In reality, given the number of stock-outs our customers experienced (more on that below), the revenue target was likely most definitely higher than the sales figures actually achieved. Finally, at Fuse, we always encourage our customers to modify the forecast by including relevant details like product launch dates, products that are phasing out, as well as other information they might know about their business that an algorithm doesn’t. For purposes of our analysis, however, we excluded that information. 

Even assuming the above simplifications, we found that our customers could have made 10% more revenue and avoided 450 stock-outs (on average) during Q4 if they’d followed Fuse’s algorithm. In fact, one of our earliest customers who joined the platform in Q4 had zero stock-outs in Q1. 

What does this mean? Well, for one thing, it means that Excel is definitely not the right tool for growing businesses to plan inventory. In addition, it also means that even without additional input from our customers, Fuse’s initial predictions (based on seasonality) can achieve dramatically better results for our customers.

Reduce Overspend on Inventory by 3x

What we often find with the growing companies we work with is that a significant stock-out in the past, or paranoia about stocking out, leads to panic overbuying. This ties up precious capital and resources in inventory that could be deployed elsewhere. 

In Fuse, we use a forward-looking weeks of supply target to help customers maintain a lean inventory buffer. We often find that many of our customers are managing their buffer using sell-thru (which is backwards looking) or a historical weeks of supply target. For a growing business, these backward looking metrics don’t reflect current trends, and can lead to dangerous overbuying. However, with Fuse, it’s now possible to look forwards instead of backwards, thanks to our accurate forecast and real-time actualization of sales.

We took our customer’s forward-looking weeks of supply target (based on Fuse’s forecast) and applied it to create a recommended inventory buy and replenishment recommendation. What we found was that on average, our customers were overstocked in almost 200 products and spending 3x what they needed to on inventory. By following Fuse’s recommendations, our customers can dramatically reduce their inventory spend and more efficiently manage their working capital, freeing up cash for initiatives that will grow their business, like customer acquisition.

Conclusion

Our data shows that prior to Fuse, our customers were buying not enough of the right SKUs and too much of the wrong SKUs. With Fuse, our customers can switch this around and invest more capital on the right SKUs and less on the wrong SKUs. At Fuse, we’re here to help you focus on your business, not your inventory.