Smiths News currently maximises the sales of magazines whilst optimising “on shelf “ availability, sales efficiency and stock management for both publishers and retailers by the deployment of a widely recognised industry leading Sales Based Replenishment solution (SBR), based on the use of daily retail EPoS data to forecast sales demand at outlet level.
 
Over the last two years we have delivered both a rapid expansion of our SBR model to deliver a national offer across a wide retail customer base (currently circa 2500 outlets) for the top 500 product lines, whilst developing and implementing a number of bespoke retailer trading format replenishment models designed to optimise the performance of magazines within each retailer’s unique trading characteristics.

The SBR system is managed and developed from our Swindon Head Office by the Marketing Services Team. This team liaises with retailers and publishers to identify ways in which we can further develop our SBR capabilities to drive further benefit to our customers.

Each day the required replenishments are produced by the system and fed in to our distribution network for delivery the following day. We are distributing 1.5 million copies each month in small top up quantities to maximise sales and availability in each retailer providing EPoS for each publisher’s title.

So how does this work?

Our sales based replenishment solution is based on the principle of holding a proportion of qualifying EPoS retailers allocated supply in a collaborative stock pool at each distribution centre, for subsequent in life cycle replenishment to retail outlets, based on the relative sales demand of those outlets compared to previous issues sales patterns.
 
The Oracle sales based replenishment solution uses EPoS data feeds from retailers to populate dynamically calculated store/title level sales decay curves based on the last six issues history.

Matching current rate of sale over time at outlet level to the titles historic sales curve, allows forecast demand to be calculated and by comparing forecast demand to current stock in store, in product lifecycle replenishments of stock can be calculated to meet sales demand at the optimum sales efficiency for the outlet.

Sales curve attributes and replenishment parameters are flexible and have allowed Smiths News to deliver a number of bespoke sales based replenishment models designed to meet the unique needs of retailers or product formats.

What are the benefits?

SBR has consistently delivered results materially above what the normal copy management process can deliver. It has improved availability in store substantially; driving extra sales whilst at the same time used less copy to do so, thus generating unsolds savings.

Availability: SBR increases on shelf availability by over 10% when compared to copy allocation where no top-up supplies are sent.

Extra sales: SBR has driven over 1.5 million extra sales in the last year, a 1.8% copy sales increase for the retailers.

Unsolds savings: SBR has achieved the availability and sales increases whilst reducing unsolds by 4%.

Over the last year, Smiths News has expanded its SBR offer materially. The volume of copy impacted within the retailers has increased by 50%.

A core focus of the business is expanding this service offer and further developing the solution to increase the benefits realised by retailers and publishers.