Competitors and What is Different
- Software companies that try to build automated software where needed to input some parameters and the software provides with calculations. From our experience, it’s not possible to automate neither sales forecasting nor inventory planning, as each business is unique and it’s not possible to cover all the nuisances of the business through parameters in a software. From our clients we know that all the attempts to automate either of these processes by buying different software don’t bring good results. Moreover, in terms of the demand planning, all the software work in the way that the user needs to input either the future demand or the reorder point numbers. The user cannot decide about neither of them accurately or update them constantly. In best case, the software calculates and calls the future demand – the average of the past sales, that is completely incorrect.
We are forecasting sales professionally and fully rely on our knowledge and extensive experience in the area. Our company has people who do their jobs daily for different companies, and they are very experienced in knowing what is required, what is missing, which questions to ask and how to resolve issues.
- Logistics individuals or inventory planners and managers whom companies can hire. E-commerce businesses, as usually not having a physical office, try to hire cheap personnel through different freelance platforms. The problem that the logistics individuals and even experienced inventory managers don’t work with statistical tools to predict the demand; they don’t really do the comprehensive analysis of the data, as it requires a lot of efforts and experience in working with data. Thus, in the bottom line, these people don’t look at the big picture of the organization, don’t understand all the impacts and act at the end of the day as simple numbers estimators or coordinators.
- Consulting firms in supply chain management and inventory management areas. First problem, they charge a high hourly rate, so for hiring their services on a monthly basis, the client can end up with very high costs, or just won’t be able to afford to hire these services. Another problem is that when you go to their websites, they never explain how they are going to approach the problem of the inventory management. They list their services and their explanations are very short and pretty the same, as on other websites. In addition, they usually don’t mention that they work for e-commerce businesses, that what we are much experienced in and most concentration of our business is in. Lastly, consultants are usually not hard-working people, and won’t work hard for clients to analyze all their reports and data, as we do.
