Using our SmartConsulting methodology we can help you as a retailer significantly increase sales and margins, reduce surplus inventory, and lower carrying costs. To determine to what extent this would be true for you, we take you through our Seven Steps to Higher Sales program. The Seven Steps program ensures a full understanding of what makes our consulting “smart” and determines how dramatically we can improve your bottom line.

IDEA Can Help
Starting in your stores, we connect your POS system to the software portion of Elucidate.  Then, instead of periodic reordering which already consumes too much of the time of your highly skilled and experienced staff, Elucidate replenishes what was consumed.  Instead of ordering your products weeks in advance based on forecasts, you place smaller orders more often based on actual consumer demand. The result: your products are much more likely to be both on the shelf and sold at full markup.  Your sales and margins increase while you reduce your investment in inventory.

Forecasting is the Issue
If there is one certain truth in forecasting - the forecast is always wrong.  What many supply chain experts and consultants will tell you is you need to get "close enough" to allow your company to manage variations in demand and due dates.  Companies all over the world spend billions every year to get better forecasts.  Has all that money spent on forecasts eliminated shortages and surpluses?  The answer is no.  Shortages and surpluses are still a fact of life for almost all retailers because they suffer form one fatal flaw, forecasting!

IDEA Removes the Guess Work
With IDEA's Elucidate approach you don't rely on forecasting!  Elucidates turns your products into SmartProducts.   Inventory is replaced based entirely on consumer demand.  As a product is sold it pulls its replacement throughout the supply chain.  The result is drastically reduced inventory levels, elimination of over stocks and sell outs.  The inevitable consequences are, most importantly, increased sales and margins!

Changing the Supply Chain that Feeds the Stores
Once the stores are operating according to a demand-based replenishment approach, IDEA moves upstream to regional distribution centers, to central distribution centers and then to your vendors or manufacturing plants.  Software alone is insufficient.  The prevailing culture of batching and forecasting does great damage throughout the supply chain.  People are blind to it because they have never seen anything else.  IDEA changes perceptions.  We show a new way.  We open eyes.  Simply stated, IDEA leads a paradigm shift.  

A philosophy of Win-Win
We believe so strongly that Elucidate is a superior approach that we base a majority of our fees on your results.  What does that mean?  It means two things: that we help you earn you far more money and produce far more cash than we charge in fees and that most of our fees are paid only after you get these results.  Practically speaking, we guarantee your results!