Neal’s Yard Remedies was formed in 1981 and is driven by a passionate belief that health and beauty should be more natural, less synthetic. They also take this approach when sourcing ingredients and support and promote organic farming. Neal’s Yard Remedies sells its products through its own proprietary distribution network, consisting of shops, e-commerce, mail order, pop-up shops and direct selling as well as through third party retailers.
In 2017 Neal’s Yard Remedies migrated to a Cloud based retail management platform to create a highly integrated, real time and intelligent data core to drive its retail operation to:
- Synchronise and unite all multi-channel retail outlets
- Make manufacturing leaner
- Optimise stock levels
- Improve promotional performance
A Manufacturing Retailer
Before its migration to a new Cloud based retail platform, a lack of stock control impacted manufacturing, especially as Neal’s Yard Remedies own retail operations which are such an important sales channel for the business. With traditional system silos, re-ordering of products and forecasting and thus manufacturing was problematic. Add to that the fact that Neal’s Yard Remedies don’t use synthetic ingredients, with many orders placed twenty-four months in advance.
“Our ingredients are fresh so their shelf life is quite short,” explains Jason Cook, Head of IT, Neal’s Yard Remedies “So you have to use it there and then and get it into your product. You can’t have fresh herbs sitting around on the shelves for months waiting for production. Having an intelligent Cloud platform helps us be certain we get the ingredients we need, to manufacture them and get them to the shop. The whole manufacturing cycle, really relies on having good information coming from your shops and what your sales patterns are going to be so you can forecast what your growth is going to be. Our supplier orders are now placed based on intelligent data enabling our entire manufacturing process to become leaner.”
Maximising Profit and Minimising Wastage with Stock Levels
To help Neal’s Yard Remedies get the right stock levels across their stores they use a minimum and maximum inventory level application. This feeds through to the integrated purchase order system and this recommends what needs to be ordered based on the minimum and maximum levels. “This makes the whole process efficient,” comments Jason.
“The min max levels get us through 90% of the year, but when we move into Christmas the sales patterns become more dynamic then we will use different mechanisms for restocking the shops, such as switching to the algorithm re-stocking tool. And we stock the shops more frequently, delivering twice weekly instead of the once.”
Organic Growth Through Strategic Intelligence
Neal’s Yard Remedies uses its highly-integrated Cloud retail management system to drive promotions strategically to manage in-store offers. Jason Cook explains:
“We can now offer centralised, regional and individual promotions without having to wait overnight for the shops to download the promotion, they go live immediately”.
Neal’s Yard Remedies are meticulous in their analysis of all their promotions, so they can see what works as well as spot any emerging trends, as Jason explains:
“Our Cloud platform has given us a greater insight into how promotions are working and how people are buying products. For example, are they combining products in baskets we didn’t expect, so we can then do a basket analysis. We can look across the entire business, and then drill down using a business tool, which gives us a great insight into how the business is working. And because the data is live it means we can respond instantly to emerging trends. We have three people solely focused on analysing the information which comes out.
Having an intelligent Cloud core enriches the company’s decision making process about what we might promote together, and we can see the impact of our promotions in the sales figures.”
To find out more, watch RetailStore and Jason Cook take part in the Expert Panel Debate at the Retail Business Technology Expo (RBTE) 2017:
Click here to watch the debate
Rachel is passionate about retail and the ever-changing retail technology environment, with a keen eye for upcoming retail trends that are set to shake up the sector.
