How to Overcome Forecasting Difficulties in the Fashion and Textile Industry

Slimstock’s intelligent supply chain planning platform ensures optimum in-season allocation and reduces stockouts, excess stock, and markdowns to maximise full-price sell-thru.

The days are finally getting warmer again and consumers have their eyes on the new summer fashions. At the same time, however, retailers need to think one step ahead and start planning for the autumn collection.

After all, at the end of the season, stores and online shops in the fashion industry need to minimise excess stock within the sales window. But never-out-of-stock (NOOS) items, such as basic shirts, may be in particularly high demand in different sizes and colours depending on the location.

From small boutique stores to large fashion retailers, it is important to always have enough bestsellers in stock and to plan the optimum number of seasonal items at the right time. This reduces costs for overproduction, storage, and waste at the end of the season. However, this is only possible with advanced supply chain planning tools, such has Slimstock’s award-winning platform, which forecasts sales of both permanent and seasonal items as well as special offers as accurately as possible and ensures optimal allocation, i.e., distribution of stock throughout the store network during the current fashion season. In this way, the platform also helps to avoid markdowns or the sale of outlet goods to reduce excess stock.

Overcoming the forecasting difficulties of fast fashion

Fast fashion trends make it particularly difficult to forecast demand. The constant change of product ranges and short sales histories make it increasingly difficult to forecast sales volumes. The advanced Slismtock platform uses AI, sophisticated algorithms, and fact-based calculations to provide all the necessary forecasts and analysis relating to orders and stock in the fashion sector.

This is realised with the help of advanced statistical methods using machine learning, taking into account seasons, trends, and other factors such as sales promotions. In addition, thanks to the integrated simulation function, the effects of various influencing factors can be displayed with just a few clicks, allowing companies to adjust their planning in good time if necessary.

To-do dashboards for prioritising tasks and orientation by means of user workflows provide a comprehensive overview and increase responsiveness through the influence of sales and inventory-related factors. In this way, central scheduling ensures that goods in the right sizes, quantities and colour combinations are delivered to stores quickly and overstocking is prevented. Planning errors are also avoided, and supply chain costs significantly reduced, while the to-do dashboards also enable exception management and thus contribute to greater employee efficiency.

“With Slimstock, we offer our customers a complete end-to-end solution that supports them from sales planning through inventory, purchasing and production planning to sales and operations planning (S&OP) and integrated business planning (IBP),” explains Birger Klinke, Head of Sales & Marketing DACH at Slimstock GmbH.

“As a result, international and local fashion and textile retailers such as Desigual, Suarez and Falk&Ross, who rely on Slim4, benefit from significant added value and can master the complex challenges in the fashion industry much more easily. Desigual, for example, has managed to reduce its stock levels by 27% while improving product availability by more than 4%.” In addition, users of Slim4 in the fashion industry are experiencing around 30% lower process costs and up to 50% less depreciation.

Optimum availability of goods on different sales channels

Regardless of how many sales channels a fashion brand uses to offer its range – whether in the web shop, online marketplaces, in several brick-and-mortar shops, or various shopping malls – Slim4 always ensures reliable product availability. Taking into account specific size profiles, seasonal styles, events and promotions, the software always calculates optimum stock levels. This means that availability displays on various sales platforms in e-commerce are always up-to-date, stock shortages are avoided, and a better Google ranking is achieved.

As a result, Slim4 uses data-supported planning to help fashion and textile retailers build sustainable, secure supply chains. Inventory planning is optimised by the software forecasting demand for each sales channel individually on a daily basis and dynamically adjusting stock and repeat orders. As an advanced add-on solution, Slim4 can be seamlessly integrated into any existing ERP system and comes into play precisely where the basic functions of business software reach their limits in inventory management. Last but not least, fashion and textile retailers benefit from Slimstock’s extensive expertise resulting from the numerous integration projects that the software provider has already implemented for its more than 1,500 customers.