Balancing the stores before the weekend

The assignment

“Balance our stores before the weekend. Find what's overstocked in one store and short in another, move it along our usual lanes, and never take a store below its display minimum. Tell me what still needs the supplier.”

What it used

• The replenishment rules — the display minimum each floor keeps, what a store may give away, and how far stock may travel.
• The usual lanes into each store: its own stock room and the distribution centre always, the other floors ranked by distance, everything else after.
• The pull desk into every floor — 4 walks over 44 pages and 36,396 position reads — each proposed line with the store's own position, reorder point and target, and its recent sales.
• The donor's own spare for every store-to-store line — 2 reads, one per donor and variant.
• The stock on hand today, store by store (19 report pages).
• The city on each store's location record, so the follow-up's Montreal is read and not guessed.
• The variants, products, styles and categories behind every line, so knitwear is known by its category and every line has its name.
• 501 calls in all, every one through the connector.

The rules the desk kept are the merchant's own, read from the replenishment rules. A store keeps its display minimum: two units of a variant on the floor, in every store's rules. A store gives only what stands above its own target and that minimum, and only when the spare is three units or more. Stock moves along the usual lanes, within six hundred kilometres. A transfer request holds at most 24 lines. The order of the lines, the cut into requests and the hold are the assistant's arithmetic: inside each store-and-donor pair the lines run fast-movers-first by each line's own sales over the last thirty days, a pair's lines are cut into requests of 24, and a line held back is held, not sent from somewhere else.

The proposal

The stores are short of the same things, so little moves between them. 4 lines move store to store — 7 units in all — each from a store holding more of a variant than its own target and display minimum together. The distribution centre carries the week: 308 lines and 468 units into the four stores. 6,074 positions below target found no store with spare stock; they still need the supplier.

Harbourline Queen West gives Knitwear style 458 (FW26) in Charcoal, size L, to three stores — 1 to Harbourline Yorkville, 3 to Harbourline Rideau and 1 to Harbourline Sainte-Catherine: the whole of its spare of 5 and not a unit more. It had 10 on hand against a target of 3 and a display minimum of 2. Harbourline Yorkville gives Harbourline Queen West 2 of Women's style 574 (FW26) in Forest, size 10, from a spare of 5 — 10 on hand against a target of 3 and a display minimum of 2. Every store-to-store line was checked against the donor's own spare before it was proposed: 4 lines checked, each at or under that spare.

What the distribution centre sends, store by store:

In all: 312 lines and 475 units over 8 store-and-donor pairs, cut into 19 transfer requests of at most 24 lines each — 308 lines from the distribution centre and 4 from another store, every store-to-store pair a request of its own.

What still needs the supplier — the positions below target that no store could fill:

6,074 positions in all. Every one is there for the same reason — no store held spare stock of the variant: 6,074 positions with no donor, none covered only in part. Buying for them is the buy desk's weekly job, the first worked example; this one moves stock and buys nothing.

The follow-ups

“Montreal's weather just turned. Move knitwear there first, and don't take anything out of Yorkville this week.”

The store in Montreal is Harbourline Sainte-Catherine — shop floor; its location record says Montréal. Its knitwear goes first: 38 lines and 38 units, moved to the front of its requests and cut into requests of their own ahead of the rest, fast movers first inside — among them the Knitwear style 458 (FW26) line from Harbourline Queen West. Nothing leaves Harbourline Yorkville this week: 1 line was coming out of it — 2 units of Women's style 574 (FW26) in Forest, size 10, into Harbourline Queen West — and it is held for the supplier or next week; the assistant does not pick another donor, the desk does. The plan before the follow-up: 312 lines, 475 units, 19 transfer requests. After it: 311 lines, 473 units, 18 requests.

The exceptions

• The donor's spare was read for every store-to-store line before it was proposed: 4 lines checked, each at or under the donor's spare; 0 lines whose donor could not be read.
• 19 transfer requests were rehearsed through the connector, one for each request in the plan, and shown back with their confirmation tokens; none was confirmed, and the count of open transfer requests was the same before and after.
• 6,074 positions below target found no store with spare stock. The plan sends nothing for them and says so; they are the buying plan's, not this week's transfers.

What stayed the merchant's call

The assistant wrote nothing. Every transfer request above was rehearsed through the connector and shown with its confirmation token; none was confirmed, and the stores' stock stands as it was. The lanes, the display minimum and the three-unit rule are the merchant's own replenishment rules. The order of the lines, the cut into requests and the Yorkville hold are the assistant's arithmetic over the engine's suggestions, and the merchant can change any of them. What still needs the supplier is a buying question, not a transfer — the weekly buying plan's job, the first worked example. The owner's own session, with these prompts put to the assistant, follows.

Where every figure comes from

Every figure on this page is read from the run file at the render. Each one is a call’s answer by its number, or a figure derived from the answers by the formula beside it. Nothing is typed.

The tool calls

• whats_next — 1 call
• run_read · me — 1 call
• org_layout — 1 call
• run_read · replenishmentConfigs — 1 call
• run_read · transferLaneRanking — 4 calls
• run_read · rebalanceSuggestions — 44 calls
• report_run · stock_on_hand — 19 calls
• get_record · PhysicalFacilityLocation — 4 calls
• run_read · allocationSuggestions — 2 calls
• get_record · Variant — 186 calls
• get_record · Product — 166 calls
• run_read · styles — 7 calls
• run_read · categories — 1 call
• run_read · transferRequests — 2 calls
• run_write · createTransferRequest — 19 calls
• get_record · OptionGroup — 5 calls
• get_record · OptionValue — 38 calls