Take Your POS & Inventory Reporting To The Next Level

Smart Reporting Capabilities

Behind every great report is a great planner. Someone who knows what questions to ask and how to align data to answer them. At ERS, we live and breathe reports.

But what makes a report great? It comes down to how often it gets used and how much insight it provides. We strive not only to make great reports – but smart reports. Reports that do the thinking for you or point you in the right direction.

Do your reports do that?

Anatomy of A Smart Report

These 5 must-have features are the key to getting the most use out of your reports.

Power BI item planner dashboard showing item performance, inventory health, sales trends, and forecasted annual potential.

1 Helps Manage Item Status

For those companies with a significant number of SKU’s, status plays a vital role. It helps prioritize action that may need to be taken. Using around 5 statuses enable a good understanding of where your inventory stands.

3 Contains Comparative Time Frames

You learn by comparing, so smart reports provide benchmarks or different time periods from which the reader can quickly determine trends. The most common are TY v LY, week over week, month over month and 4 or 8 week averages. Other variations like before a promotion and after a promotion are helpful.

5 Provides Actionable Insights

Most reports are simply rows of data that require the reader to make heads or tails of it. Subtotals are great, but that doesn’t make a report smart. Smart reports are infused with expertise that make a specific recommendation of action for an item.

2 Has Visibility to the Total Pipeline

Planners on both the retail and supply side want to see each other’s inventory position at some point. Integrating them in one report is one of our top requests. Seeing the total on hand, available at warehouse and future production reduces surprises and saves the time and effort of having to look at additional reports.

4 Shows the Past, Present & Future

Most reports have the past and present down. Few incorporate the future. Forecasting is a discussion within itself, but even the simplest estimate of the next 8 weeks can be helpful. Basing the weeks of supply on the future is far better than the past.

1 Helps Manage Item Status

For those companies with a significant number of SKU’s, status plays a vital role. It helps prioritize action that may need to be taken. Using around 5 statuses enable a good understanding of where your inventory stands.

2 Has Visibility to the Total Pipeline

Planners on both the retail and supply side want to see each other’s inventory position at some point. Integrating them in one report is one of our top requests. Seeing the total on hand, available at warehouse and future production reduces surprises and saves the time and effort of having to look at additional reports.

3 Contains Comparative Time Frames

You learn by comparing, so smart reports provide benchmarks or different time periods from which the reader can quickly determine trends. The most common are TY v LY, week over week, month over month and 4 or 8 week averages. Other variations like before a promotion and after a promotion are helpful.

4 Shows the Past, Present & Future

Most reports have the past and present down. Few incorporate the future. Forecasting is a discussion within itself, but even the simplest estimate of the next 8 weeks can be helpful. Basing the weeks of supply on the future is far better than the past.

5 Provides Actionable Insights

Most reports are simply rows of data that require the reader to make heads or tails of it. Subtotals are great, but that doesn’t make a report smart. Smart reports are infused with expertise that make a specific recommendation of action for an item.

Drill From Summary to Item-Level Detail

Smart Reporting gives users a high-level view of item performance, but the report does not stop there. Users can drill from the main performance page into deeper item profile or forecast views, making it easier to understand what is driving the recommendation and what action may need to be taken.

Right-click the Item ID, Description, or Annual Potential field and choose the Item Profile or Item Forecast drill-through view.

Item Profile
Item Forecast

After reviewing the item-level detail, return to the main performance page and continue reviewing the items that need attention.

Curated. Actionable. Retail and Wholesale Ready.

This is what modern inventory planning should look like – everything you need to plan and manage inventory in one place.

The Launchpad

The start page- fully customizable for your business- shows the key information you need: sales and inventory. Year over year, week over week, any time period. Custom attributes and channel information. Buttons take you directly to the functions you need.

Monthly Forecast Flow

Projected inventory by month with estimated sales and recommended buys. Lead time, ATS & WIP, seasonality and other smart features make it accurate and easy to use. A Buy Sheet that contains units, cost and whatever information you need to place orders.

Alerts

In any BI report, create notifications based on criteria and receive an email or chat notification when the criteria are met. For example, the notification on the right was triggered once sales units for this particular product exceeded 20,000 units.

Item Performance with Recommended Actions

The reports show you what to do based on an advanced ranking system and inventory health criteria. Created by inventory experts who live and breathe retail and wholesale planning every day.

AI Visualizations

Programmed to find opportunities and liabilities using ERS’ Retail Narrative engine. It also takes advantage of Microsoft’s powerful AI models to find trends in your data.

Performance Over Time with Images

Drops an item in a quartile based on how well it sold in it’s 1st 8 weeks. For example, items in the top quartile sold very well in the first 8 weeks (based on units and sell-through) while others were dismal and landed in the 4th quartile. 

We believe it is easier to “see” the commonality than to look at color or other attribute descriptions.

Item Performance with Recommended Actions

The reports show you what to do based on an advanced ranking system and inventory health criteria. Created by inventory experts who live and breathe retail and wholesale planning every day.

AI Visualizations

Programmed to find opportunities and liabilities using ERS’ Retail Narrative engine. It also takes advantage of Microsoft’s powerful AI models to find trends in your data.

Performance Over Time with Images

Drops an item in a quartile based on how well it sold in it’s 1st 8 weeks. For example, items in the top quartile sold very well in the first 8 weeks (based on units and sell-through) while others were dismal and landed in the 4th quartile. 

We believe it is easier to “see” the commonality than to look at color or other attribute descriptions.

Store Penetration

Shows how many stores sold a new item for the first time, as well as the time it takes to penetrate a retail chain. For example, an item may have shipped to 1000 stores, and in the 1st week only 100 stores sold that item. In the next week, another 200 stores started selling, and so on. 

Store penetration is also good for judging items against each other. For example, one item could have 50% penetration in only 2 weeks, while others take 5 weeks.

Top and Bottom

Highlights the top and bottom performers with recommended actions and grades. Makes more use of the AI visualizations to help determine why. they perform the way they do.

Future Lost Sales

It’s important to know how much business you’re going to miss when inventory is not available. This both helps prevent future stock issues but also helps improve sales planning.

Customized Dashboards that Aren’t Just Pretty

We will design customized dashboards to help you answer questions about your business. Let the intelligence comb through your millions of lines of data to make recommendations on how to improve your business. All are created to spur on action- unlike static reporting that just gives you information.

Get the Big Picture

Get a handle on your business. This one scorecard gives you everything you need to get a handle on your business. Is your team spending hours putting this information together? This automatically refreshes each week- giving them all the time back to take action rather than building reports.

Pinpoint Opportunities and Liabilities

Quickly learn which new items are performing best, which items have the most sold out stores, which items have too much inventory and any other key factor important to optimizing your business. Add geography and demographics to learn even more.

Using the Influencer AI visualization in Microsoft PowerBI enables you to unlock patterns in your data you may not have known existed.

Improve Pricing Strategy

This dashboard studies your history to understand what effect prices have on your sales and predict future sales and revenue based on it. It will automatically adjust the forecast based on promotional activity.

Watch it in Action

Business Overview Videos

Part 1: Watch a demonstration of the ERS Retail and Wholesale Analytics modules including Business Overview, Scorecard, Top & Bottom Items, Smart Item Performance, Ad-Hoc Report Builder, New Product Introduction Performance Over Time, New Item Store Penetration.

Part 2: Demographic Profiling, Promotion Viability, Multi Week Tracking, Year over Year tracking, Regional Analysis, Color & Size Ratios.

See Your Smart Reports in Action

Smart Reporting explains the reports ERS can create and the insights those reports can surface. BI Dashboards show how those reports come together in a more visual, interactive experience, helping teams review performance, monitor items, and act on the information faster.

Explore BI Dashboards
Use the powerbi influencer to help answer questions about your business
automatically adjust forecast based on promotional activity

A paradigm change in reporting

We built a system that does the analysis for you.

Check it out

Contact ERS today to improve your decision-making abilities with better, smarter retail sales and inventory reporting. We’ll help you gather your data – anything ranging from EDI 852, Web Portals, Excel Files, to Text Files – and then provide seamless reporting and analytics from it.