Make DART part of your daily routine in 2024, use it as a tool to avoid lost sales and prevent and address challenges now. Our DART expert Lewis Baker shares his top tips for getting the most out of your Grocery data in 2024…
1. Get visibility of your availability
DART uses EPOS data to effectively benchmark what availability of products should be like to be directed to where you’ve got gaps and take action accordingly. At field level it points you towards where you have a challenge with availability with a particular product at a particular store on a particular day. At head office it shows you where you may have a bigger gap which may be a distribution issue or depot challenge. This visibility of your product availability allows you to manage your stock effectively and avoid gaps on the shelf.
2. Manage Promotional Activity
DART allows you to be directed to your promotional performance – where it’s performing well and not performing well. At store level this could mean ensuring products are activated correctly, promotions are at the right price point and on the right fixture. At Head office level, it’s about ensuring your promotion has gone live for the space you have paid for. Is the data showing as a promotional uplift? If it hasn’t, do some digging to check if the stock has gone out and if the feature has gone live.
3. See into the future with predictive capabilities
DART doesn’t only allow brands to act on things that already an issue, there’s also a predictive mechanism. This can give users visibility of where they may have an inventory issue in the next 3 days. This means you can act on something before it has occurred. The preventive model allows you to take preventive action instead of reactive action. You may have a promotion going live in 3 days and DART alerts you that you have 50 stores that don’t have the sufficient stock levels to secure the promotional uplift in sales. Use this data to get a view into the future and address these challenges before it’s too late.
4. Separate distribution challenges
DART separates out where you’ve got a wider scale distribution challenge so you can get to the bottom of it. If something’s not coming to the store or hasn’t sold a unit in the last 14 days, it flags it as a distribution challenge. That could mean the stock’s not getting to the depot or to the store. At a field level, DART only alerts you if there is an issue with that particular store. If the rest of the region is performing well but that store isn’t, it allows you to discuss why; Factors such as if there’s a book stock error or if you need to get stock into that particular store. If it’s a wider area where a depot didn’t supply the right level of stock, DART can flag that at Head office to highlight there is a distribution challenge on this specific product, showing geographically where the stores with a shortfall are. As a National Account Manager, you can use this data to take action such as calling the buyer to drive more stock in. It gives you oversight of where you have a longer term distribution challenge and gives you the geographical and store visibility of where that occurs so you can have conversations at both field and head office level to ensure ranging is compliant.
5. Identify excess stock pockets
DART allows you to see where you have excess stock pockets. From a field level, you can identify if there is any incremental opportunity. It’s all based on rate of sale and days cover. You might go into a store and discover there’s a really high selling line and too much stock sitting in the back. By using the DART historical sales data you know you have to take action and bring that stock out onto the floor because it’s a high performer. At head office level, DART can fuel stock data to give brands a view of how much stock is out there. This allows users to look at it from supply chain and assess if stock levels and allocations are correct.
6. Highlight your trends
DART lets you highlight trends and underperformance so you can act on something you may not physically see when in store. For example, if the data tells you there’s been an ongoing issue on the last four Mondays, you can have a discussion about why. This could be down to issues in store such as staff shortages. This helps direct important conversations with staff in store to avoid lost sales.
7. Put a monetary figure on the gap through lost sales value
If there’s an issue, DART allows you to not only quantify it from a volume perspective but a value perspective. This is powerful at both field and head office level. At a field level, it allows you to highlight the specific monetary value you are losing until this issue is fixed. From a National Account level, it’s the same premise. Colleagues can go to their retailer or internal contacts and discuss the financial gap flagged by DART and the best way to resolve it. DART uses lost sales value data to attribute to monetary value.
8. Get flexible coverage
Availability boost allows you to be flexible and pulse in data led resource for peak selling periods or events. Real-time team resource combined with EPOS analytics, allows brands to be in the right place at the right time – fixing any unexpected barrier to sales. Available in any UK region, having access to the right data will make the difference in edging out competitors. If your brand wants to get ahead during peak seasons and selling events in 2024, Availability Boost should be an essential part of your strategy.
If you’re ready to elevate your existing strategy in 2024 or want to manage your data better in the Grocery sector, talk to us about DART.
