Killing the Restock Spreadsheet

Every retailer I talk to has some version of the same Tuesday. Export sales out of the POS, dump it into a spreadsheet, scroll through hundreds of SKUs trying to eyeball what's running low. You're doing this from memory and gut feel, not from a real par level, because nobody has time to maintain 91 supplier budgets by hand in Excel.

Get it wrong one way and you run out of your best sellers on a Friday. Get it wrong the other way and you've got cash sitting on a shelf in slow moving product. Either way it's the same person, usually the owner, burning a morning on a task that a computer should be doing while everyone sleeps.

We built vendor managed inventory, VMI, directly into WeedUs Commerce, and we built it against a real store: Kemps SODO. Not a demo dataset, not a sample. We pulled 25,329 actual POSaBIT V3 transactions into the engine and used them to compute real budgets for 91 suppliers.

That's the part I want to be clear about. This isn't a generic reorder calculator that asks you to type in your own numbers. It reads what actually sold, at that store, through that POS, and builds the math from there.

The system tracks a par level per SKU, meaning the quantity you want on hand at any given time. It watches your real on-hand inventory against that par, and when a SKU drops below it, that SKU gets flagged.

From there it doesn't just hand you a flat list of flagged SKUs and wish you luck. It groups them by supplier and builds a restock proposal for each one, so what lands in front of you looks like a set of purchase orders ready to send, not a spreadsheet you still have to sort.

A background worker runs this on its own every week. Nobody has to remember to export anything or open a spreadsheet to kick it off. It just runs.

The job changes shape. Instead of a morning spent exporting, sorting, and guessing, you sit down to a set of proposals the system already built, grouped by supplier, based on what actually sold and what's actually on the shelf. Reviewing that takes about two minutes.

You're still the one approving the order. We're not trying to take that judgment away from you. What we took away is the hours of manual math that used to stand between you and that decision.

VMI in Commerce is live and running on real transaction data at Kemps SODO right now, refreshing weekly in the background. The next step for us is tightening the loop further: getting proposals to auto-submit to suppliers who support it, and expanding par level tuning so the system handles seasonal swings on its own. But the core problem, guessing at restocks off a spreadsheet, is already solved for the store we built it with.