Challenges
Big Lots Inc., through its subsidiaries, is a unique, non-traditional, discount retailer operating more than 1,400 stores in 48 states with product assortments in the merchandise categories of food consumables, furniture and home décor, seasonal goods, electronics and accessories.
Big Lots needed a better way to allocate inventory specific to each of its 1,400+ retail locations to further accelerate inventory turns, align inventory levels to sales demand while matching local preferences, and managing thousands of active SKUs across a broad portfolio.
Non-traditional retail operations
Big Lots needed to allocate inventory specific to 1,400+ retail locations.
Improve inventory positions
Big Lots needed to align inventory levels to sales demand while matching local preferences.
Manage thousands of SKUs
Big Lots must act, react and adapt quickly based on customer demand and consumer buying trends.
Solutions
Today, Big Lots runs a complex, high volume supply chain that processes thousands of store/SKU transactions per day. The company needed the ability to act, react and adapt based on actual customer demand and consumer buying trends. Increased ability to sense and respond allows Big Lots to place merchandise at the right location and the right time to improve inventory positions, and increase customer satisfaction and sell-through.
Advanced Allocation improves Big Lots’ performance by tightly aligning and balancing store sales volume and inventory levels. With Logility Allocation™, Big Lots is able to quickly and accurately plan and allocate at the subclass level, or lower.
“Logility Allocation uses complex logic in a simple to use solution. We have seen improvement in planning and our ability to adjust to the customer’s behaviors. This helps us stay ahead and strategically plan our allocation needs,” says Lisa Bachmann, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Big Lots.
Since implementing Logility, Big Lots has realized several benefits including improved inventory turnover along with deeper insights and understanding of customer behavior. Big Lots has access to advanced analytics, KPIs and reporting which has led to developments such as lost sales analysis, helping the retailer better plan for the next season.
Inventory Planning and Optimization
Allocation
For retailers, selecting the right location can make or break a business. Big Lots sees store location as an opportunity to make strategic buys that will provide inventory specific to each market. With the increased sales data available to the team, the company is able to determine buying patterns as well as preferences for each store location and feed this information back through the supply chain. This unique capability allows Big Lots’ allocation analysts to place inventory in markets where it will best sell.
Results
Logility’s allocation solution allows Big Lots to integrate allocation and fashion replenishment options to dynamically react, adapt, and take action based on customer demand and sales trends.
With Logility, Big Lots was able to achieve significant and quick improvement in inventory turnover and enable processing of 50 million store/SKU transactions per evening. It was able to align inventory investments to sales demand at very low levels of granularity – by store, by merchandise, by product. Logility provided access to advanced analytics, KPIs and reporting, and Big Lots developed lost sales analysis which has helped them better plan for the next season.
