SAS helps optimize inventory to meet customer demand.
Product availability and superior customer service are essential for retailers to attract and retain customers. Understanding the data behind products, suppliers, distribution and stores is critical to running a successful business. And that’s precisely what Travis Perkins is doing.
Travis Perkins is the UK’s leading builders’ merchant and home improvement retailer, operating four divisions and 2,000 branches nationwide, with annual revenues exceeding US$7.8 billion. In total, the group sells over 200,000 unique stock-keeping units (SKUs), ranging from plumbing and heating products to tiles, roofing and insulation.
“Many of the goods we sell are bulky, and space in our physical stores is limited,” says Peter Brewer, Supply Chain Development Manager at Travis Perkins. “We have an extensive range available on short lead times within our supply chain, but we need to identify and stock in-branch the products most important to our customers for immediate supply.
In the past, Travis Perkins managed inventory using spreadsheets fed into a legacy core system. To decide which products to stock at each branch, category managers had to sift through thousands of rows of data. The process was time consuming, and gaining insight was arduous. To help category managers make smarter decisions and work more productively, the company set out to build a better way of working.
Travis Perkins decided to transform its approach to inventory management using SAS® solutions. For help on the journey, the company enlisted CoreCompete, a SAS partner specializing in analytics.
“Most range management solutions available on the market would not have been able to deal with the volume of products we stock or the complexity of our organization,” Brewer says. “SAS and CoreCompete proposed a robust solution that could cope with the size and diversity of our business and allowed us to layer sophisticated analytics over traditional range-management capabilities. We were particularly impressed with the purpose-built dashboards and user interface of the SAS offering.
Today, Travis Perkins gathers data on sales, customers, branches, suppliers and more using SAS Data Integration Studio. With the data in a single repository, category managers can slice and dice it from a category, branch, supplier or customer perspective using SAS Visual Analytics. As a result, they can make better decisions about which products to stock in each branch, without cumbersome number crunching.
With SAS, Travis Perkins doesn’t just see what is going on, but can also pinpoint the reasons behind changes in the numbers. “In the past, we could see fluctuations in sales of each product, but we couldn’t work out what was driving them,” Jenkins says. “Now, we have detailed data at our fingertips, so we can join the dots between products, customers and branches to build a clear picture of what’s going on.
With the new solutions, Travis Perkins has also gained deeper insight into its dealings with each supplier.
Previously, when Travis Perkins performed range management using spreadsheets, different people used slightly different formulas to calculate certain key metrics. By standardizing on SAS solutions, the company has built greater consistency across the business.