Buyers and planners spend 15–25 hours per week on manual demand analysis — pulling sales histories, reviewing trends, and creating buying plans in Excel — resulting in costly over-stock on slow-movers and out-of-stocks on key lines.
Retail planning involves interacting variables — seasonality, promotional uplifts, competitor activity, weather, trend data — that exceed human cognitive capacity to analyse manually. Most businesses rely on intuition and outdated Excel models that aren't refreshed frequently enough.
I've been buying for 16 years and data analysis was always the thing I was least good at. Now Copilot does the analysis and I do the buying instinct. My out-of-stock rate this season is the lowest of my career.
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