Direct Store Delivery Software

Good things come from speaking with users. Last week we had our annual user convention in Florida. This is fantastic gathering of HighJump customers from around the world and across our many solution sets. I am always humbled by the ways customers use the system in innovative ways. Very often we get to see these little nuggets of brilliance that are being used in the field.

Normally I shy away from talking about our products. However, in order to tell the story, I need to give you a couple of tidbits. In one of our flagship direct store delivery software (DSD), route accounting systems (RAS), called HighJump Route Administrator™, we have a feature called suggested order. It allows you to create a calculation script that suggests which products to put on the shelf and the proper quantities. One of the possible data points that can be captured and used is the current customer quantity on hand. If you capture that on every visit you can calculate your sell through rates and inventory turnover. We had always spoken about this as a way to ensure you avoided two situations: Product expiring on the shelf (waste) and running out of product (lost sales).

One of our customers explained to us the fortunate unexpected consequence of doing this. When you set up a new store with your products you make a lot of guesses about the profile of that store and the products that they will sell. You tend to use a lot anecdotal experience and demographic data. However, in the end it is a bit of a best guess. Outside factors that are very hard to account for tend to affect the sales at any individual selling point. The unexpected consequence of measuring the Customer Quantity on Hand at each visit and adjusting the Suggested Build-to levels is that the product mix ends up self adjusting to account for the actual sales profile of that store. In fact, it does this very quickly. Even if you get it completely wrong at the beginning, it will adjust itself within a few weeks. Using a little bit of smarts, you can also then make some assumptions about new products to put in that location and just as easily test the viability of those new products in that location. If you are really clever, you can also measure the impact on the rest of the product mix by adding or subtracting different lines. Carefully adding and subtracting lines on 6 week interval to drive product excitement has a drastic impact on bottom line profitability.

Your DSD data tells you everything you need to know about shelf level execution and the product mix effect of different product availability. This leads you into food cost planning and profitability. Who knew …