Introducing new styles to the market has become one of the emerging needs of the retailers, as the customers are always searching for something new. This resulted in fast fashion – a term used by the retailers to describe clothing that moves quickly from the catwalk to stores to meet the new trend.
One of the best examples of a retailer who has flawlessly dealt with the trend is that of the brand Zara, who has worked to improve their inventory turns to around 10 to 12, while the other brands could do only 2. Substantiating on the same, Rajul Jain, Co-founder & CEO, INCREFF said “This slow inventory turn is primarily due to legacy processes, long supply chain, large and constantly changing variety, low depth and size complexity and multi-channel retail.”
Rajul further added “Lower inventory turn leads to significant revenue and margin loss and high working capital needs is very detrimental to growth. This led to the formation of INCREFF (Incredible Efficiency).”
INCREFF, a B2B technology and analytic firm, helps fashion and lifestyle brands improve their revenue and margins with intelligent merchandising and efficient fulfillment through single view of inventory. The company provides two solutions including INCREFF IRIS and INCREFF ASSURE and cloud warehousing service Waas that helps the retailers increase efficiency on the supply side and therefore improve their inventory management.
IRIS is an intelligent planning, buying and distribution platform that helps increase inventory turns. The technology helps the retailers with key merchandising decisions like what to buy (which product clusters, how many designs, number of pieces, etc.), when to buy (timing, drops) and where to showcase inventory. The platform also provides actionable insights for daily decision making. IRIS ensures that the supply mirrors true demand as accurately as possible. It creates product clusters based on as many as 22 attributes & predicts right number of options & right depth at each cluster at each store. Moreover, the software is designed to predict the true size set ratio; all of this is done at individual store level and no store clustering is done.
IRIS suggests an ideal buy plan that ensures that the assortment plan is done correctly. The buying plan is built based on the integrated inventory across all stores, warehouse and pipeline inventory. The MOQ (minimum order quantity) of the vendor is kept in view. It can also suggest an optimal store allocation, based on the historical sales data, quick replenishment, inter-store transfer of stock to maximise conversion and minimise stock out. For new store, the allocation is done based on the analysis of DNA of the same stores.
ASSURE is a web-based omnichannel fulfillment platform, exposing single view of inventory for both offline and online channels. The software has four modules including integration, warehouse management, order management system and inventory management system. “INCREFF takes away the need of physical automation and helps in digital automation. Here, technology takes all the decisions eliminating chances of human errors. ASSURE allows brands to expose 100 per cent inventory to all sales channels without physical fragmentation. Its near-real time inventory and order sync with marketplaces allows brands to expose even last piece of inventory across all channels and hence improves inventory efficiency drastically,” explained Rajul.
The company has a strong R&D team and continuously works towards introducing innovation to the market bringing solution to some of the major issues of the industry. The company will soon be launching a pure SaaS version of its IRIS platform which would revolutionise the way merchandisers and planners work today. The implementation of the software is done within a day without any specific requirement of any hardware or software.
“In general, our clients have seen a revenue improvement of 25-30 per cent and margin improvement by 4-5 percentage points. One of our clients has seen 2-3-fold jump in revenue from same inventory holding. With another client who can support by agile manufacturing, we are targeting to achieve 6-8 inventory turns,” commented Rajul.
Talking about the future perspective of the company, INCREFF aims to become the most impactful technology solutions company in the world. After its successful penetration into Indian market, the company is now working on strategies to expand itself globally. “India itself is a huge market for our products but we aim to be a global dominant player. We have entered into partnerships with various organisations and people to help us in our business development across globe,” commented Rajul.
Furthermore, the company is also working to launch more products in the coming years. “We will be automating quite a few elements on supply side of things for same customers via various SaaS products. Our major focus is on growth. We aim to become a multi-billion-dollar company in 5-7 years from now,” concluded Rajul.
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