Measuring the Effects of Automatic Replenishment on Product Availability in Retail Stores

Maintaining product availability is one of the biggest challenges in retail business because it directly relates to lost sale and decrease in customer loyalty. A solution that ensures a more accurate prediction and eliminates costly stock-outs and wasteful overstocks is an automatic replenishment system. The goal of this paper is to measure the impact that the automatic replenishment system can have on product availability in retail business, especially when it comes to specific product and store related risk factors. A large quantitative study measured the performance of manual and automatic replenishment processes in a sample of 85 stores and 95 products of a major retail chain in Serbia. The study concluded that utilization of an automatic replenishment system can reduce stock-outs for the retail chains up to 60%. Specifically, when ordered through an automatic replenishment system, fast-selling products recorded 40% greater availability, products on promotion 48% higher availability, and products in a high-density retail stores 59% higher availability. The findings extend current understanding of automatic replenishment systems, and especially their performance related to high-risk retail conditions.