Today, analytics are being applied to an ever-broader array of issues, challenges, and opportunities. From calculating the optimal loading, routing, and scheduling to transportation resources, to improving disease and drought resistance, to predicting traffic patterns and congestion, to identifying fraudulent tax returns, to understanding shopping behaviors, analytics are everywhere. The same holds true for distributors. Increasingly, analytics can be applied to any and all facets of a distributor's operations, including:
- Inventory management -determining appropriate inventory levels across all SKU's and locations, confirming optimal order quantities and frequencies and knowing where inventory is best held.
- Customer segmentation - Measuring those customers that are most and least profitable, determining the cost to serve them and assessing the ease of doing business with them and their willingness to collaborate.
- Supplier segmentation - Measuring which suppliers are most and least profitable, determining the cost to carry and calculating the ease of doing business with them and their willingness to collaborate.
- Product portfolio analysis - determining which products deliver the most profit, volume and differentiation to the company.
- Price optimization - Calculating the price that will maximize selected variable(s): sales volume, gross profit and net profit. Determining price elasticity across customers, regions, and categories and identifying price interactions.
- Workforce optimization - Understand how the attrition of aging/retiring employees will affect future business performance, identifying the ideal number of employees by skill set, geography, and customer group and allocating those employees to accommodate selected variables.
- Network optimization - Identifying the ideal location of warehouses, distribution centers, and sales branches and confirming the ideal number of trucks, delivery vans, location, routing and loads.
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