Shred the Spreadsheet: Restocking lead times

We talk to retail cannabis buyers every day about their problems and struggles. These buyers range from single location stores to MSOs, and come with a litany of challenges that are sometimes unique to their size and sometimes overlap perfectly across the range.

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Our Happy Buyers users are invited to participate in a monthly session called The Customer Council where we collectively deep dive into their most pressing issues as retail buyers. It’s a meeting of the minds, a roundtable with no superior and no public listening in. 

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Just honest, open conversations about the realities of buying for cannabis retail.

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With all this access to specific, highly valuable information on how buyers can improve and overcome their problems, we’ve decided to share more of it in our blog, our webinars, and on social media.

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We’re calling this series “Shred the Spreadsheet” and we’re going to highlight any problems we hear where a buyer has to use a spreadsheet to solve it.

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We’ll pick a problem of the month for our blog, and this is the first.

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What’s the Problem?

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Restocking lead times - not of the backroom, but of the sales floor from the backroom.

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There are many ways lead times affect reordering. A buyer may have an order delivered, but it may remain unsellable for a number of days while it goes through receiving. For instance, the products may need to be labeled, batch data entered into the POS, and quantities checked against Purchase Orders. The product is “in stock”, but it may not be sellable for another 5 days.

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How does a buyer accurately reorder products to keep from going out of stock on the sales floor, but also account for accurate lead times once product is received so they don’t end up overordering to play it safe?

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Another issue with the nuance between “in stock” and “sellable” is that if a product isn’t on the sales floor, it doesn’t get sold.

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Budtenders work visually through inventory when recommending products to customers. Out of sight, out of mind, not getting sold. The challenge is ensuring the retail team knows to replenish something from back stock with enough lead time so it never goes out of stock up front.

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Many retailers have some real problems here. 

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How do you solve for intake lead times to make sure you don’t run out of stock before new batches are labeled? If a product isn’t out of stock in the store, but is out of stock on the sales floor, how do you make sure it gets replenished out front and sold? 

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Most Retailers' Solution: You Make Another F’n Spreadsheet

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We have one customer that has over 40 spreadsheets, each one a tool to solve a specific problem. This problem represents one of the over 40 tools they built in Google Sheets. And they’re not at all alone. Every buyer’s problem we encounter has a workaround solution housed in its own spreadsheet.

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For this issue, a retailer needs to track inventory in every room in their spreadsheet and analyze the sell-through from front of house to deduce when something is within a few days of being out of stock on the sales floor. This requires multiple different POS exports and pivot tables to parse out what needs to be replenished. In addition, you’re relying on your staff remembering to utilize the spreadsheet. The number of stories we hear of high margin products not selling for multiple days in a row when there are hundreds of units in backstock makes our wallets hurt.

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Within your master reordering spreadsheet, you need to manage the lead times to account for order processing, delivery times, and as mentioned above, intake lead times.

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For instance, let’s say you want to replenish to 14 days of inventory on hand for an infused 1g preroll SKU. Your spreadsheet adds in lead times on order processing and delivery (7 days) as well as receiving lead times (5 days). More often than not, orders get padded and SKUs get overstocked because ordering accurately is too time consuming.

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The time it takes to manage just this lead time problem alone across multiple stores represents close to 5 hours head-down in a spreadsheet per week for this buyer.

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Our Solution: Shred That Spreadsheet

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These are the problems we live to hear about, because they’re problems we can solve in Happy Buyers. We know it's hard to be happy when you're spending your life chasing down formula errors in your spreadsheets that everyone keeps forgetting to utilize. That's why we've made it our mission to make y'all happier!

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Retail buyers asked us to build lead times into our tool for accommodating order processing and delivery, which we released a few months ago. Now we are working on tracking inventory before it hits the sales floor, while it is en route from the vendor or with the receiving team getting labeled. Our goal is to get hyper accurate on “sellable inventory” versus “inventory on hand”. We’re also designing alerts for replenishing the front of house to prevent “phantom out of stock” where a product isn’t getting sold while it’s in backstock but not on the sales floor.

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Already, buyers using our tool are experiencing 20-30% more accuracy in their reordering calculations, and saving an average of 10 hours every week doing it. We expect to keep pushing those numbers higher the more we uncover these types of problems and challenges and create solutions.

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Do you know of a retail buyer struggling with this problem? Send them our way and we’ll share the love through our referral program.

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Are you experiencing any other challenges in your store that you’d like us to profile here? Reach out here and let us know!