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AI-enabled planning ensures availability for all categories and channels

Oct 3, 2024 2 min

Discount and general merchandise retailers face unique challenges that manual planning processes can’t address. The vast array of products carried by retailers in this sector requires a more sophisticated approach to support inventory efficiency and customer satisfaction. Supplier-specific complexities, including long lead times and unpredictable deliveries, add another layer of difficulty as retailers try to maintain optimal stock levels. 

Omar Louzir, RELEX Lead Business Consultant, shares some of the ways that RELEX is helping these retailers leverage AI-enabled technology to build a better supply chain that drives efficiency, reduces costs, and improves customer service and margins. 

Transcript 

Forecasting and replenishment efficiencies are among the biggest challenges that discount and general merchandise retailers face today. Some of the most critical challenges that these retailers are facing are: 

  • A broad assortment and a high level of seasonality. 
  • Complex supply network, coming from long lead times, high shipping and storage costs, fluctuating supply chain constraints, and infrastructure issues. 
  • Economic sensitivity that requires responding quickly to any demand fluctuation. 
  • We also need to keep the costs down to ensure availability and value for customers across all channels. 

So, how can RELEX help the discount and general merchandise retailers? 

They need the best in class, AI-enabled features. Automated end-to-end planning and replenishment ensures supply chain efficiencies and product availability across all categories and sales channels. 

RELEX streamlines managing complex supply chains by monitoring inventory across the network to secure availability, consolidating orders to efficiently fill the trucks, and meeting supplier order requirements. 

It dynamically optimizes the safety stock to balance sales maximization with minimizing inventory costs. It also enables accurate planning for promotions, seasonal items, product launches, and discontinuations at both the DC and the stores. 

RELEX also helps reduce costs and enhance adaptability. It provides a single shared plan for stores and distribution centers. It automatically translates in-store changes into DC future requirements.  

The tool offers full visibility to identify potential bottlenecks across the supply chain. It empowers users to make changes in real-time through a highly configurable business rules engine.

No matter how complex your supply chain is, RELEX gives you visibility into your entire assortment, pinpoints potential supplier bottlenecks, highlights potential capacity constraints and proactively solves them so you can get the right product to your customers no matter what, where, or how they want them. 

Reach out to learn how RELEX can help you build a better supply chain. We would love to talk.