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Our client operates 14 stores in Arizona, with more locations opening through 2025. Purchasing inventory for them has always been a labor-intensive task.
Prior to implementing Happy Buyers, the Director of Procurement had to work store by store, exporting all the POS data from each location and placing them into a pivot-table-laden spreadsheet to try and understand true accurate run rates, sales velocity per SKU, and amounts to reorder.
He had to account for all sorts of anomalies: holiday sales, rotating SKUs within certain groups (like strain-specific prerolls), and lead time for order processing and delivery, among many others.
Our client then built out a central distribution center to manage all purchasing for each store in a centralized manner. This initiative would be a success for the retailer if the Director of Procurement was enabled to purchase across 14 stores in minutes rather than hours.
Going store by store was no longer going to work. That’s what brought them to Happy Cabbage.
Director of Procurement
There’s a certain comfort that comes from handling purchasing and inventory from your stack of spreadsheets. It also comes with all kinds of pain and frustration and TONS of hours. But hey, at least you know the equations, you know where to make tweaks, you are making it work, even when you are making purchasing decisions from a laptop on your vacation.
When the Director of Procurement was evaluating Happy Buyers, both accuracy and speed were extremely important. He was fast to jump on the quoted run rates and reorder rates he was seeing in the platform to test each for their accuracy. Other solutions had let him down in the past in this regard.
He went line-by-line comparing all of our data against their own calculations in Dutchie and spent hours reconciling the data. It was undeniable: Happy Buyers was more accurate than the manual processes that our client had been relying on.
By far the most time savings for the Director of Procurement came from the multi-store export feature. This feature alone saved countless hours. Previously, this was where he had to go store-by-store to manage his responsibilities. This was the largest immediate big win for our client.
“Happy Cabbage has really helped me out a lot with getting all these numbers and equations I was doing inside of my head into a toolset and process, and saving me a lot of time and efficiency on getting everything going.”
The multi-store export feature is just one of many ways the procurement team saves heaps of time in his purchasing process. In fact, there are additional insights Happy Buyers provides that he simply did not have in his data before and needed additional equations to solve for.
1. Stock-in and Stock-out events
POS data doesn’t include stock-in/stock-out data (like how many hours a unit was out of stock, for instance). Retailers use all these crazy equations to try and solve for this to understand an accurate “days available to sell” number for each SKU.
This is how people end up with 33 days of inventory on hand rather than 14. This Director of Procurement can now complete these analyses in minutes vs the hours he previously committed to this task while hitting the golden number of 14 days on hand.
2. Demand Groups - rotational SKU problem
We call this the “Jeeter 1g pre-roll problem” - it’s not really Jeeter’s fault, they’re just a perfect stand-in for any product that constantly rotates in SKU but belongs to a specific group of products: Jeeter 1g pre-rolls, Dialed In strain-specific gummies, or limited release concentrates. So many products have this problem.
How do you calculate demand on a product SKU that is dropping for the first time? Before Happy Buyers, the Director of Procurement created pivot tables, had to bring in all the SKUs that fit the group into the equations, and then add any new items the store brought in to the group’s equations to keep them accurate.
This quickly became untenable.
In Happy Buyers, however, our Demand Group feature literally does this work for him in under 2 minutes. No spreadsheets, exports, or pivot tables necessary. All new products are automatically considered in the data sets.
After only 6 months of using Happy Buyers, all 14 stores are currently stocked to 14 days on hand. This represents hundreds of thousands of dollars in available cash flow not locked up on their shelves.
They’re now getting accurate run rates within just a few days of inventory sales for any given SKU at any of their stores. How much money is at play in those run rates?
In those 6 months, Happy Buyers has processed $2M of wholesale purchasing weekly. Over the last 30 days, the Director of Procurement purchased $7M in product for the stores.
As you can probably tell, small mistakes in order accuracy can have major consequences. Being 1% inaccurate can result in $70k in locked-up cash flow in just 30 days.
Happy Buyers is a big win for them and allowed them to execute on central distribution; initially intended to be a cost savings, but is now embedded in their process.Nothing makes quite as much impact as the time savings, however. The purchasing team is able to save 8-11 hours a week on ordering activities. Not only that, but the team is confident they're getting it right and keeping days on hand tight for their stock. Talk about peace of mind.
While it sounds like a corny tagline, because of these savings, the Director of Procurement was finally able to take a vacation!
“It saved me hours upon hours every day of work that I have to do. So super happy with Happy Cabbage, no pun intended.”
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