POS Data: The Beginning of DDSN for Consumer Products Manufacturers
by Kara Romanow, Janet Suleski, Debra Hofman, J. Paul Kirby, Laura Preslan
February 5, 2004

The Bottom Line: Consumer products manufacturers must centrally manage all demand signal data, including POS, to create a Demand-Driven Supply Network (DDSN) that improves demand visibility to reduce stockouts by more than half and increase Perfect Order performance by 17%.

Wal-Mart shares Point-of-Sale (POS) data with its suppliers, including competitive data for category captains, and many other retailers now follow suit. Although several manufacturers described POS data as the purest demand signal available to them today, most companies continue to treat POS data as tactical information. This is a legacy of when Consumer Product (CP) manufacturers had little or no access to near-real-time data, but rather relied on service firms such as ACNielsen and IRI to provide cleansed and aggregated POS data, albeit at the cost of several weeks’ delay.

Nearly every CP company uses POS data somewhere in its supply chain.  The two most common uses are demand planning and collaboration, particularly Vendor-Managed Inventory (VMI) and Collaborative Planning, Forecasting, and Replenishment (CPFR).  Applications from vendors including Blue Agave can accept POS data as a feed into their applications, resulting in forecast accuracy improvements and increased customer service. 

view complete article (registration and subscription required)

source: AMR Research, Inc., copyrighted information