When shopping at the grocery store, it is common for consumers to be faced with product shortages on the shelf. Given this situation, he has two options: buy the same item from another brand or go to another establishment to make the purchase. However, in both cases, the retailer or manufacturer faces a revenue loss.
In a highly competitive market, improving product availability at stores is essential to strengthen customer loyalty and prevent or reduce loss of sales. If a product is not available, you need to find out the reason. And that’s where OSA (On Shelf Availability), a supply chain indicator, plays a key role.
In addition to providing the availability index of items on the shelves and the root causes of their shortage, OSA also shows the projected sales per product, per store, per day, as well as the effects of product shortages over sales and actions to correct them.
In an evaluation of 30 product categories in Brazil, OSA signaled 6.7% of unavailability, and identified that the main cause of this product shortage were shelves not replenished. That is, the item was in the store, but the sales associate did not replenish the shelf.
Using assessments like this, OSA can help to better manage the supply chain, thus ensuring a significant reduction in losses. It also makes it possible to establish collaborative strategies between manufacturers and retailers to improve the rate of product availability.
You can have access to OSA through the solution Supply Chain Insights, which aims to help manufacturers and retailers to prevent problems such as out-of-stocks and excess inventory.