When using the Order Generator, it’s important to see the ‘whole picture’ when deciding which items and quantities should be ordered for stores, especially for initial orders each season. After recent analysis, we determined there may be instances where retailers (particularly Lowe's) may not immediately receive items which were just shipped. Days and sometimes a week or two can go by before the recently shipped items will show up in the store's 'on hand' quantity. When this happens, it creates a gap in the data where items no longer show up as 'on order', nor do they appear as 'on hand'.
Knowing this, we’ve added a few important metrics to help identify when shipments have left your warehouse, but have not yet shown in the store’s on hand qty. We call this ‘shrink/swell’. This happens when the total qty shipped for the year does not match the quantity sold & on hand for the same time period. We’ve added 3 fields to help identify this situation.
FYTD Shipped -- # of units shipped fiscal year to date. This shows if you have shipped any product to a location this fiscal year. You can right click anywhere in the data column (not the header) to filter on rows where you either have or have not shipped an item.
FYTD Units -- The number of units sold this fiscal year. This allows you to confirm if a product has sold in a location this fiscal year.
Shrink / Swell - shows the difference between what you have shipped minus the total on hand and sold (fiscal year to date).
A negative number indicates shrink, where you shipped product to a location, but the quantity was never reflected in the location on hand inventory.
A positive number indicates swell, where the location on-hand quantity is larger than what you shipped to that location. Knowing this can help prevent shipping excess product to a store that already has sufficient inventory.
If/When you see positive values in ‘Shrink/Swell’, this is highlighting shipped units which are not reflected in either the current on hand or units sold.