Retailers ‘return-to-vendor’ stock discrepancy solved and stopped

The Challenge

This £4.7b global fashion retailer was experiencing issues with ‘return-to-vendor’ stock. The credits received from its largest supplier rarely matched the debit note raised for expected refunds – to the tune of more than £1m discrepancy per annum. They wanted us to help them save the money they were losing.

The Solution

As we tell all our customers, give us your data challenge and we’ll create a bespoke solution to solve that problem.

For this customer we first had to scope out the entire payment process and analyse all related data. So we collected data from across the process - commercial, finance, stores, warehousing, and couriers. The key supplier provided tens of thousand lines of data in multiple formats across hundreds of SKUs and thousands of shipments. This data was collated, sorted, and loaded into Barcanet’s powerful technology.

Next, experienced subject-matter-experts worked through the data pools, to build-out reports and dashboards which would surface insights specific to our customer’s data matching challenge. They enabled the business to identify the root mis-match causes and smooth them out. Additional functionality was added - we created multiple what-if scenarios which help identify improvements across processes and commercial terms.

The Results

Understanding the root cause enabled the business to make some key and quick changes which led to an annualised saving of over £150k with this single supplier. They developed better processes and terms across other suppliers which led to a further £100k+ in annual savings.

We continue to help this customer make sense of their data and save money they would have otherwise lost. The data is collected on an ongoing basis, and our bespoke dashboards continue to help identify potential losses in ‘real time’ and the ability to act quickly.