Kellogg boosts availability

Powerful new number crunching tools from the company that processes Tesco's ClubCard data have helped Kellogg boost availability at the multiple's stores by quantifying precisely how much business it was losing by running out of stock.

Jon Geraghty, senior propositions director at till roll sales data analyst Dunnhumby told delegates at a recent IGD conference: "Just knowing your average availability figures isn't much use. You need to work out how they actually translate to the bottom line."

By monitoring point-of-sales data by the hour in order to identify sales patterns for individual stock keeping units in individual Tesco stores, Dunnhumby could quantify exactly how much money manufacturers were losing due to lack of stock, he said.

Jonathan Urch, customer marketing manager at Kellogg, said: "We monitored sales of 500g packs of Kellogg's cornflakes at Tesco's Shoreham store over four weeks in February.

"We discovered that we were running out of stock late in the day and missing out on £214 a month in that store alone, which equates to £2,500 a year."