North West Case Study
Executive Summary
The North West Company is a leading retailer of food and everyday needs to rural and urban neighborhoods across Canada. They are currently using a “push” strategy, which the category manager at North West headquarters in Winnipeg analyzed trends, placed orders and allocated products to stores. Inspired by Giant Tiger’s example of a “pull” system in action, North West management was considering giving store managers more control over their inventory ordering by moving to a “pull” merchandise replenishment strategy — also known as localization. Using this “pull” system North West will need to invest $10 million in order to support the Open To Buy (OTB) for the retail stores managers. The issues North West are currently facing are they are unable to reach their annual inventory turnover rate target of 3.0 and money tied up in unsold inventories.
In order to reduce the risk and capitalize the benefit of any changes North West should implement to localize certain product category in the hands of retail managers. This strategic change will be beneficial for North West instead of giving all the responsibility to local retail managers and avoid investing a large amount of dollars to support the technology for the pull system. The category manager will then produce product menu selections for retail store managers to choose items and quantity coming in to the retail stores.
Issue(s) Identification
The North West Company is experiencing inventory management problem with unsolf inventory is piling up and short lead times. They are having a difficult time increasing their yearly inventory goal turnover rate from 2.2 to their annual target rate of 3.0 for the past six years. Their popular items often sell out the day it arrived in stores. Excess stocks will be marked down using North West’s markdown program up to 75 percent level. The unsold inventory will be then shipped to North West’s Clearance outlet in Winnipeg. Currently, North West is sitting on
The North West Company is a leading retailer of food and everyday needs to rural and urban neighborhoods across Canada. They are currently using a “push” strategy, which the category manager at North West headquarters in Winnipeg analyzed trends, placed orders and allocated products to stores. Inspired by Giant Tiger’s example of a “pull” system in action, North West management was considering giving store managers more control over their inventory ordering by moving to a “pull” merchandise replenishment strategy — also known as localization. Using this “pull” system North West will need to invest $10 million in order to support the Open To Buy (OTB) for the retail stores managers. The issues North West are currently facing are they are unable to reach their annual inventory turnover rate target of 3.0 and money tied up in unsold inventories.
In order to reduce the risk and capitalize the benefit of any changes North West should implement to localize certain product category in the hands of retail managers. This strategic change will be beneficial for North West instead of giving all the responsibility to local retail managers and avoid investing a large amount of dollars to support the technology for the pull system. The category manager will then produce product menu selections for retail store managers to choose items and quantity coming in to the retail stores.
Issue(s) Identification
The North West Company is experiencing inventory management problem with unsolf inventory is piling up and short lead times. They are having a difficult time increasing their yearly inventory goal turnover rate from 2.2 to their annual target rate of 3.0 for the past six years. Their popular items often sell out the day it arrived in stores. Excess stocks will be marked down using North West’s markdown program up to 75 percent level. The unsold inventory will be then shipped to North West’s Clearance outlet in Winnipeg. Currently, North West is sitting on