Phantom Inventory Trend.

Overview

The Phantom Inventory trend is an Avantalytics original - a proprietary panel that we created in house to help you solve otherwise challenging inventory problems. This is probably our most valuable panel, as proper mastery of it can improve inventory management so much that the panel pays for not only itself but the entire Avantalytics program. The Phantom Inventory Trend panel attempts to help you discover if there is an issue with inventory on hand at the retailer by keeping a rolling, 8-week log of inventory movement at each store location.

If you’ve ever been worried about accurate inventory counts in the retail stores, you are familiar with the amount of time, work and stress constantly chasing down inventory store-by-store can create. It can be difficult to uncover issues at the store level such as when inventory becomes damaged or goes missing and the retailer doesn't bother to report the loss, or when your product is simply hidden and therefore not making the visual impact that would otherwise result in sales. The Phantom Inventory Trend drills down to the store item level over a rolling, eight week period, and looks for any instance where you’ve had the same amount of inventory on hand for eight weeks without a single sale. The panel then compares each qualifying item to the average sales the rest of the stores in the market generate. What Phantom Inventory does is rather than let you know that an item is out of stock, it alerts you to the fact that you are not selling a product where it's statistically demonstrating you should be selling product. This product was designed so that the system could alert you of potential problems, cutting out the need for you to proactively try to find that needle in the haystack.

Phantom Inventory quantifies both the minimum and maximum retail sales laws based on that store's neighboring stores and it also provides you with a metric to understand how much inventory is being wasted at this store according to what you have on hand. This is important because this allows you guys to go right to the needle in the haystack and target inventory problems with surgical precision. So again, from a sales-loss basis, we have customers who, simply by focusing on mastering the Phantom Inventory Trend Insight Panel, more than cover the cost of Avantalytics' service. Just being able to know where you’re losing sales pays for everything.