WHSmith Travel, a UK retailer operating 181 international units, has partnered with RELEX Solutions to help it improve demand forecasting and replenishment. The retailer’s goal is to increase availability, reduce waste and improve customer satisfaction for its short shelf-life products, including sandwiches, prepared salads, chilled food-to-go and convenience range.
Using the RELEX solution also will give WHSmith the ability to analyze passenger numbers and footfall and to use machine learning to conduct regression analyses to predict future customer visits.
“Our travel arm is the most rapidly expanding part of our business,” said Ian Windsor, CIO at WHSmith in a statement. “There is a great need for us to enhance our decision making around forecasting and replenishment in order to make our supply chain operate as optimally as possible. We want our customers to be able to select the products they want and we need to make sure our food cabinets have optimized stock levels, so we do not lose out on sales.”
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WHSmith is set to release the new system in spring 2017.
