Store Sales Vs. Weeks Of Supply (WOS)

Overview

The Store Sales Vs. Weeks of Supply (WOS) insight panel is really two panels, but either view characteristic is designed to give you a quick insight panel to monitor your inventory position by store vs the sales coming out of each store.  While a traditional tabular format is useful, we recognize that viewing many stores can be difficult without scrolling etc.  In recognition we also created a Scatter Plot view so you can quickly scan to see how the entire group of stores is performing and quickly see any outliers.  Below are some views of this panel and a description of its features.

The benefit of this panel is not to focus on the actual metric of a weeks of supply calculation, but to use this panel to identify group values vs outliers.  Because the rate of sale changes as does inventory, you're going to be better off using these to find and investigate further those cases where WOS is either abnormally high or low.

About Weeks Of Supply

Weeks of Supply is a moving target metric as its simply a measure of the inventory on hand as a multiple of the rate of sale.  The main difficulty is determining what metric to use for the rate of sale.  You can use an average of the past couple weeks, a combination of the past couple weeks with the next couple weeks from last year and about a million other combinations - but ultimately you're just making a guess at the future rate of sale and how long your inventory will remain at that rate.   

The second hiccup that can trip up customers is whether to use the retail or cost value of inventory and sales.  In our experience while some instance may call for retail values, cost of goods sold vs inventory cost is a better metric as it removes any issue of retail fluctuation. 

What we do in this panel -  to keep things simple, whether you look at the total sales over a year or a  week, at retail or at cost, we use the prior week's sales at cost vs the remaining inventory at cost as the metrics for determining WOS.  In a seasonal environment this can lead to overstating WOS when going into season and understating when heading out of season.