I am the dairy lead for a store that is pretty high volume (some weeks above 1mill) and have been working on reducing our backstock as much as possible.
For the past 2 weeks i have been cutting our trucks each day by 100-350 pieces. That alone has nearly halved our backstock, however; I am spending at the very least 1 hour (on a quick day) and on average about an hour and a half just going through ordering... The main reason being I am having to scan literally every single item in the department to make sure we are not getting something that we do not necessarily need (ex: Calcium Kroger OJ, we have an 100% accurate BOH of say 17, a min of 6 with the 14 being sold in the past week(m7 on the gun...) The allocation would be around 16 if I'm trying to be as accurate as possible. Now on scanning this item, almost always it would show a OP order of 1, since on average we are not going to sell through 17 calcium OJ's in a day... I cancel it out and wait a truck or two till I order it.
My question is, is there anyway to actually make the Minimums work properly? Or does it just order based on forecast? How much does Allocation play a factor in the orders also? I have gone through almost the entire department and set minimums to 2 (exceptions on some fast movers of course).
Hit for and look at the minimum daily supply. I try to set it for 2 days for grocery and 3 days for Peyton since we get less Peyton than grocery, and there is a 2 day lag between orders and 3 days for one of the Peyton trucks. If you set the minimum to 6 for example, Cao will predict whether or not you might drop below 6 in thevery next few days and if it thinks you will, it will order it. Just adjust the minimum so you have enough supply to get to the nexterm truck. Sometimes Cao is wrong though and items that get spikes might need a higher minimum, for example, if I only sell 20 boxes of cheerios a week, but 10 of those boxes are bought on Friday and Saturday, then I would set my minimum to 10.
Keep doing what you are doing. It helps when you know what is on backstock everyday.
If you are using CAO Evolution already, you might be able to trick the computer by lowering the Allocation. I don't think CAO uses the Min for Order Evolution. Don't quote me on that.
My experience is in Dry Grocery for a Marketplace. We are not on Order Evolution yet.
F9 will show the MDS. When you change the min or Alloc, the MDS goes up and down. Minimum Daily Supply. That is how many days you have enough product for. So, if you have a truck everyday, you can try making the MDS = 1.
F3 will show the sales history by individual days for the last month. If you sold 12 a week ago, that is why CAO is ordering. I have to watch sales items like a hawk. CAO will want to keep ordering like it is still on sale a week later. We had one customer that would buy all 6 cases every two weeks of a certain product off the shelf on the day that I don't have an order! Finally, we decided to keep 2 cases on backstock at all times.
You could send your District Coordinator an email and ask them to have IT look into that specific item and ask them to explain why CAO wants to keep ordering it. Might be a bug.
Do you check your order on the computer before ordering? My BOH data on that screen is never correct. The BOH on the telxon is correct. I can only change ordered items to 1 before the order. After you process order review and fix the re directs, I think you can then change those numbers to 0.
I have one person that likes to look at the order under Order Details. The description is better and it keeps like items close together. But you can't edit the order from there.
CAO FUNCTION KEYS
F1 Help with F keys index.
F2 Open data field when you want to change BOH or Min or add to an order.
F3 Order History.
F4 Shows minimum change history.
F5 Closes the data field after you have made changes.
F6 When the order is open, it shows most of the info you saw on the computer when looking at the order.
F7 After you press F3, you only see the sales history for the last 30 says. F7 will go back a few more weeks. Same if you are on the info screen. Press F7 and it will show you the different trailers attached to that barcode.
F8 Undoes what F7 did above.
F9 Shows a lot of data. I normally use the MDS number to adjust my minimum when I had control of it. Minimum daily supply. We have a truck every day so 1 is a reasonable number for the MDS #. When you adjust your Min, the MDS# changes up or down.
Control O shows the order history for the last 30 days.
All you need to do is sit back and relax. Because starting Period 7, at least in my division, they are taking away all control of Minimums and allocations from the store level. What they set the values at, is what they are. That means you better have your BOH correct of you will get a a lot of UN-needed product.
Best way I learned is have the allocation a bit lower than the shelf can hold. Close to the min becuz the min cannot be higher than the allocation. So your allocation will be your new min but just a few numbers higher. So far been workin for me and I have it under control
