The Stocks tab on Pulse provides you with critical information about your stock and products. It is used to highlight the frequency of sales and valuation of poor performing stock, and it also provides health checks on stock positions, and measures how well products are utilised within your store.
The following article explains what is available in the Stocks tab, and how you can use it to optimise your performance.
An example of what the Stocks tab looks like is displayed in the image below. It provides you with a breakdown of stock and product activity within the store, allowing you to drill into stock levels by day or products by category.
Note: If you want to view any image in this article in more detail, you can right click the image and click 'View in new tab'.
Product Sales Frequency Chart
The product sales frequency pie chart gives you an overview of the rate of sale of products in your store.
It classifies them into 5 groups:
A. Every Day
These are products which sell every day in the store and are therefore drivers for consumers to come into the store.
B. Every Other Day
Good stable products that bring consumers into the store, selling at least every 2 days.
C. Weekly
These are products that sell at least once every week. These are probably not core drivers for your consumers - but are picked up often enough to be important and provide breadth to the shopper's basket.
D. Monthly
Products that sell at least once every month. We are moving into the territory now of whether the products in this classification should be stocked.
E. > Monthly
Products that are not even selling once per month. These products need immediate attention - they are probably blocking shelves from better products and are liable in the long term to generate waste, and markdowns.
A useful feature of this chart is that by clicking on the title we will get a grid detailing all of the products according to their classification, making it easy to identify the products we need to prioritise for action, as well as seeing the products that are doing well. By selecting items and clicking the 'Action' button you can quickly add the products to a campaign (see below).
Learn more about grids on Pulse by reading our How to use Grids guide.
Stock Valuation Chart
The stock valuation chart presents the valuation of stock where it has a stock position but has not sold over a certain period of time.
The chart breaks these time periods down into products which have been sitting on the shelf for 2-4 weeks, 1-3 months, 4-6 months, and more than 6 months. According to your ePoS system, these products have a stock position so if they are physically in the store, and in particular if they have been sitting doing nothing for a long period of time they are incurring two types of cost:
They are costing shelf space and denying other products a chance to sell in that position - we call these 'Shelf Blockers'.
They incurred a cost when they were bought if they continue to remain unsold that cost will end up in the bin.
It is important that these products are cleared out, sold, marked down, etc whatever it takes to move them on.
By clicking on the title of this chart, Pulse provides a drill-down grid to identify these products and help you manage them better. From here you can select any products and click the 'Action' button to add them to a campaign (see below).
Learn more about grids on Pulse by reading our How to use Grids guide.
Stat Boxes within Stocks
Pulse presents a number of stat boxes in this section which allows you to see key information at a glance. We explain below what each stat box is referring to.
Items with stock stat box
The Items with stock stat box presents the count of all the items with a positive stock position in your store. It also presents the number of units of these items and the valuation of all positively stocked items.
By selecting the blue 'More.....' button at the top of the stat box you can access a grid of all the items with stock in your store. From here you can select the products you want to add to a campaign and click the 'Action' button to do this from this page (see below).
Items with negative stock stat box
The items with negative stock stat box tells you the count of all the items with a negative stock position. It also shows the number of these items sold over the last 30 days as a contrast. Negative stocks are a persistent problem in retail, and they mainly stem from the ePoS system registering the sales of products, but the receipt of same product not being recorded, or sometimes being recorded in arrears.
By selecting the blue 'More.....' button at the top of the stat box you can access a grid of all the items with negative stock in your store. From here you can select the 'Action' button to add the products to a campaign (see below) which you can use to monitor them.
Stock utilisation stat box
The stock utilisation stat box shows you how much utilisation of stock happens in your store. Based on the number of products with a positive stock position, it tells you what percentage of these you are actually selling per day. This includes all products being sold whether their stock position is negative or not.
The higher your stock utilisation is, the better - as it means you are selling a wider range of products.
Items with labels stat box
If you have digital labels (ESLs) in your store, this stat box tells you how many products are linked to a label, and what percentage that is of items with a positive stock position.
What's Next?
We hope this guide helps you get started with your Stock management on Pulse. The best thing to do from here is log in to your Pulse account and play around with the Stocks tab on the Dashboard.
If you have any questions or feedback, we would love to hear from you. You can contact us by emailing support@markethub.ie.