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The supply chain tips that made Moose Toys a “Walmart Supplier of the Year”
Here are the supply chain best practices that helped the Moose Toys team earn Walmart Supplier of the Year.
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Leading toy and hobby brands trust Alloy
| Challenge | How Alloy helps |
|---|---|
| Customers want a proactive, data-driven partner. According to Moose Toys, the 2020 Walmart Toy Supplier of the Year, retailers are looking for suppliers to actively strategize with them to optimize their business, beyond the initial load-in. |
Make in-season recommendations on orders and replenishment. With real-time visibility into store inventory levels and POS, you can pinpoint specific locations that need more product or are sitting on too much. Use this information to help customers shift product and update orders to maximize sell-through. |
| Buyers are unwilling to take risks. So much of your business depends on selling-in and launching new products every season, but it’s hard to convince retailers to make a large buy. |
Bring cross-channel insights to your sales discussions. Alloy helps you identify larger trends and draw more confident conclusions by integrating data across all your retail partners and e-commerce channels. Impress buyers with your data-driven understanding of the market and drive trust in your analysis. |
| Highly seasonal demand means limited windows of opportunity to sell-through inventory. While consumers who want your product may be willing to wait if it’s not on the shelf right away, that demand quickly disappears once the holiday passes. |
Use Weeks-of-Supply to mitigate lost sales and excess inventory at every location in your supply chain. Make data-driven recommendations to help your retailers improve in-stocks and/or execute programs to increase velocity. Calculated based on inventory on hand, scheduled shipments, orders and forecasted POS, WoS helps you spot problem areas while there’s still time to act. Alloy can even alert you when a location’s Weeks-of-Supply fall outside certain thresholds that you set. |
| Promotions are hard to measure and harder to forecast. Whether it’s an online campaign or an in-store display, you can’t tell which ones are really having an impact on retail sales. You can’t improve what you can’t measure. |
Leverage a test and learn approach to measure and forecast the impact of marketing activities. Alloy makes it easy for anyone to compare performance between "test" and "control" groups, even before an event is over. Use the learnings to decide whether to expand it or cut it short, shift inventory accordingly and forecast and plan your next promotion. |
| Long lead times and unpredictable demand create frequent allocation situations. If demand exceeds forecast, there’s little you can do to boost supply, so you have to maximize revenue with the inventory that’s available. |
Manage order allocation to prevent the most lost sales. Alloy uses the latest sales performance to help you ensure product is going where it’s most needed and will sell-through quickly. The same data can help facilitate discussions with buyers to push orders out if you can show they have enough to meet demand, freeing up that inventory to fill other orders. |
| Reliance on sell-in forecasting leads to costly inaccuracies. Historical shipments fail to effectively capture seasonality and the true impact of promotions. If you underforecast, you’ll face OTIF fines and lost sales that can’t be recovered after the season is over. Or if you plan for too much, you’ll be stuck with markdowns and returns. |
Base forecasts and plans on the true demand signal. POS-driven forecasts increase accuracy because they correct for common sources of error like retailers over-ordering or the impact of promos. With Alloy Planning, you can also choose the best forecast model for each SKU or category and immediately integrate plan changes into day-to-day analysis. |
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