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19th January 2023 Justifying Training Investments in 2023: Upskilling, re-skilling and business change enablement are widely acknowledged as being three critical dimensions to improving company performance,...

12th January 2023 Need to Increase Staff Performance?The Next Big Thing is Capability Academy: Recent published research has identified that corporate universities are yesterday’s approach to training and education. I explored some...

3rd January 2023 Content Aggregators - How Much Value Do They Really Add?: What do we mean by a Content Aggregator? A content aggregator is a company that sells thousands and often tens of thousands of classes on...

26th October 2022 What Has Changed In Merchandise And Assortment Planning Recently - P4?: Introduction This is the final part of a part article on the impact of the last two years on merchandise and assortment planning. This time...

19th October 2022 What Has Changed In Merchandise And Assortment Planning Recently - P3?: Introduction This is the third article discussing the impact of Covid-19 and the war in Ukraine on merchandise and assortment planning. Previously...

12th October 2022 What Has Changed In Merchandise & Assortment Planning Recently - P2?: The first article in this series of 4 covered the various aspects of sales planning and channel planning. This week we address inventory, which...

5th October 2022 What Has Changed In Merchandise And Assortment Planning Recently - P1?: The major events of the last two years - the Covid pandemic and now the war in Ukraine and all its subsequent economic challenges - have...

13th September 2022 Grow Profits By Adding Martec's E Learning Classes To Your Portfolio: Grow Profits by Adding Martec's Classes to Your Product Portfolio KPMG research has suggested that online learning is the fastest growing...

17th June 2022 Empower And Upskill Your Retail And Consumer Products Sales Force

17th February 2022 Learning In The Flow Of Work - A Big Trend In Performance Improvement: Post- Covid, countries will need to jump start their economies and executives and training professionals know that they need to improve the skill...

8th January 2021 Saving Retail: A recent article in the Sunday Times Business Section included this quote from Alex Baldock, CEO of Dixons Carphone: "If all you do is...

15th October 2020 Making The Most Of Online Retail & Omni Channel When Recovering Sales

8th March 2020 Recovering Retail Sales & Profitability - Early Steps To Address Sales: In the last post, I stressed the importance of customer service and making the best of the inventory you already own, to get your customers back...

20th May 2019 Length Of E Learning Courses: Recently, one of our clients asked us whether we could make an e-learning course about profit and loss statements (P&L) in our Retail Financials...

10th January 2019 Inventory KPIs In Retail Part 2: The other important inventory KPIs retailers use are: Fresh stock percent In a fashion business, fresh stock percent is an important indicator....

20th December 2018 Who Owns GMROI And Shrink?: A user of one of our training programs contacted us with a question. He took the mastery test and challenged the answers that came up in the...

1st December 2018 Four Top Tips For Better Allocation And Replenishment: If you don’t have the world’s best allocation and replenishment software there are still things you can do to improve your allocation...

23rd November 2018 Inventory KPIs In Retail Part 1: Stock or inventory turn is the most usual measure of the efficiency of inventory control. It is the number of times within a period, usually...

10th October 2018 Sales KPIs In Retail Part 2: Sales per square foot or metre Space is a valuable and costly asset. Retailers use a number of methods to help increase returns on their...

27th September 2018 New EPOS Where's The Return On Investment: Most retailers are on their second or third generation of EPOS systems and many are gearing up for their fourth. The very early adopters, mostly...

20th September 2018 Sales KPIs In Retail Part 1: Sales KPIs are the most commonly used in retail. First of all, we will look at sales vs. last year, sales vs. plan and same store sales. These...

7th September 2018 Beware Traffic Statistics: There has been a lot of press recently about declining traffic in stores. If that’s true in your business be careful to interpret your...

3rd September 2018 The KPIs That Retailers Really Use: If you are new to retail you will need to know the key performance indicators that companies like yours use to manage company performance. This...

31st August 2018 Achieving The Benefits From Systems Implementation: Many companies insist on a return on investment analysis being prepared to justify a large investment in new systems. However, many companies...

15th August 2018 Limitations Of Averages When Forecasting Rates Of Sale: Many people use averages for forecasting (daily or weekly rate of sale), but it does mean you always under replenish sales as you go into a peak...

10th August 2018 Retail Industry Profitability Drivers: When selling to retailers there are only four ways to improve their profitability. These are: 1. Increase sales This can be done in many...

25th July 2018 Managing Your Sell Out The Equal Covers Replenishment Method: For some fashion retailers, it is important that a style sells out everywhere it is stocked at the same time, at least as closely as we can manage...

15th July 2018 Factors To Consider When Creating A Supplier Scorecard: Selecting a supplier of software is a complex process. Some sales organisations are very good at presenting themselves and less good at delivery....

7th July 2018 Know Your Customer: Retailers are frequently told they must know their customer, be customer centric, provide the kind of service customers can get online, etc....

22nd June 2018 8 Tips For Better Initial Allocations: Initial allocations (or first injections) should be enough to cover forecast sales before replenishment can kick in, plus a safety stock. And...

7th June 2018 Demand Is Demand At A Price: Forecasts are almost always generated given the current price of the items being forecasted. However, once a forecast is made, it is possible...

16th May 2018 Using Lost Sales Information To Improve Availability By 10%: Most non-food retailers don’t measure availability and don’t estimate lost sales. Yet in grocery (where lost sales are measured...

2nd May 2018 Planning And Evaluating Promotions: When planning promotions it is important to define the objective for each promotion. In a previous post, one objective was to move customers...

26th April 2018 How Difficult Is Developing The ROI On Store Training?: Many retailers do not invest enough in training store personnel. Many Learning and Development Departments find it hard to build a satisfactory...

16th April 2018 Hi Lo Vs EDLP Where To Promote: When you are planning promotions, where should you aim to invest your promotional reductions? In an earlier posting we described the good,...

9th April 2018 Performance Review And Sales Forecasting In Fashion: This chart summarizes the merchandise management process. We will explore aspects of this chart in future blog posts. This time I want to address...

23rd March 2018 Inventory Productivity Is About Efficiency Not Economies Of Scale: We’ve done some analysis on data from 28 UK based fashion retailers. They have all filed data at the UK Companies House, an official Government...

10th March 2018 Use Your Customer Knowledge: This chart shows a typical consumer decile analysis. If you have an online channel, you should be able to produce this for your online customers....

1st March 2018 Some Easy, But Not So Obvious, Ways To Reduce Your Safety Stock: Martec has carried out many projects for retailers where the goal has been to reduce safety stock. Normally we’ve reduced store / SKU...

20th February 2018 Creating The Optimum Assortment Using Good, Better, Best: Creating the perfect assortment means juggling a number of different considerations. These tips are based on project experience with our clients Follow...