Food Industry Taskforce Releases Tools to Address On Shelf Availability

On Shelf Availability is a key issue for the consumer products industry, as out-of-stocks remain at an 8 percent average rate, according to joint research by The Trading Partner Alliance (TPA), an industry affairs leadership group formed by the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) and Food Marketing Institute (FMI).

The Best Practices Solutions to Address On Shelf Availability (OSA) Guide and On Shelf Availability Root Causes Ishikawa Diagram were developed to help companies reduce out-of-stock levels. The best practices guide addresses root causes - and potential solutions - of challenges across five retail functional domains: Store Execution, Ordering and Execution, Forecasting, Manufacturing, and Category Management and Merchandising. It also identifies process owners to deal with these product availability issues throughout the supply chain. The Root Causes Ishikawa diagram highlights the leading causes of failures across these areas and is tailored for use across the supply chain.

 

“These tools are critical to helping industry reach the goal of 98 percent On Shelf Availability,” said Daniel Triot, Senior Director of the TPA.  “All trading partners must be firmly engaged and implementing best practices most applicable to each trading partner relationship or category and measuring the impact. Our project team is seeking companies willing to implement these practices and build use cases to help get us there.”

 

The TPA began researching the out of stock problem in 2013 and released a joint study in 2015 that included a “One Supply Chain” Good-Better-Best maturity model with definitions and recommendations to address the identified gaps in metrics/data, process/practice, organization and technology.