Shelf Life

Shel-life Products

Optimize Planning and Visibility to Maximize Customer Satisfaction

You need real-time information to keep today’s short shelf-life products moving through your supply chain efficiently, safely and profitably. With tighter margins, there’s no room for out-of-code or out-of-favor food products. Data Profits supply chain solutions for the food industry enable distributors, wholesalers and retailers to respond quickly to changing consumer demand and improve their service levels. At the same time, margins can be enhanced by reducing inventory and ensuring shelf-life freshness by obtaining visibility across your entire supply chain.

Shelf-life monitoring is essential for the following product categories.

  • Perishable products: Food products
  • Dated products: Calendars, coupons
  • Promotional products: Seasonal packaging, bonus packs

The iKIS Advantage

Most supply chains generate a lot of data. But, your challenge is to harness the right information, turn it into deep insight, and put it in the hands of the supply chain professionals who can make the best decisions for your organization. To support that you need a strong demand forecasting system, robust demand planning, and state of the art BI alerts. All incorporating your business rules to ensure success in handling shelf-life items.

iKIS Demand Forecasting

All good buying decisions start with a strong foundation, a good forecast. Data Profits iKIS 5.2s uses advanced algorithms to generate weekly forecasts across a multi-tier network. Get all your products forecasted at the different locations from iKIS. Our state-of-the-art forecasting system has 14 different algorithms and selects the model that best fits the demand sales and user input. Out-of-the-box averages have been 93% accurate, which means less time managing the demand forecast and more time focused on future events.

iKIS Order Management

Our order management module provides daily auto-generated optimal orders, purchase order tracking and review, vendor KPIs with scorecards, and P.O. status indicators and metrics.

State-of-the-Art BI Alerts

Our BI tools can integrate your business rules on shelf life into our state of art alerts. Reviewing forecast variance vs. actual in conjunction with the shelf-life dating on lots and rotation can ensure that freshness requirements are met. Our BI tools deliver efficient exception management capabilities to all the links of your supply chain. You can pre-set alerts to be automatically sent to email or cell phones of your corporate group, warehouse group, and vendor personnel. Selectively, you can identify suppliers to receive exception communications.

Why wait a day to take action? A DSD vendor can receive an alert and ship to your stores same day to meet tomorrow’s demand. Cutting hours and days out of your response times will improve sales and service on your shelf life items.

How does Data Profits evaluate cost of goods sold (COGS)?

True COGS is based upon a host of factors that include materials cost, acquisition cost and holding cost.

Essential Shelf Life Metrics

Here are some of mileposts of shelf-life calculations:

  • Product Shelf Life: The number of days from the time a product is produced until it expires.
  • Minimum Days at DC Receipt: The minimum shelf life remaining on a product from arrival at the DC until expiration.
  • Minimum Days to Store: The minimum number of days that an item should have remaining when shipped to the stores.

Shelf-life is integrated into our planning calculations based upon your business rules both at the DC and store levels. Our goal is to help you enhance profits by reducing inventory and ensuring freshness by maintaining visibility across your entire supply chain, empowering you to provide the right products at the right location. Using Data Profits iKIS solution for Shelf Life Management provides the following benefits:

  • Reduced out-of-stocks
  • Decreased shrink
  • Increased sales
  • Increased Customer Satisfaction
  • Managed SKU-based inventory
  • Real-time alerts

Proud media Partner to the IE Inventory Optimization Summit