Retail Inventory: Managing the Canary in the Coal Mine!

Vishal  Gaur; Saravanan  Kesavan; Ananth   Raman

Article | California Management Review | Winter 2014

Retail Inventory: Managing the Canary in the Coal Mine!

by Vishal Gaur, Saravanan Kesavan and Ananth Raman

Abstract

Retail inventory is a statistic that is closely watched by retailers as well as their investors, lenders, and suppliers. Retailers not only benefit from inventory, but also bear the cost of excess inventory. Investors, lenders, and suppliers interpret this statistic for signs of the retailer's health, future sales prospects, and impending costs. While prior research on inventory has typically focused primarily on the retailer's profit and cash flow, this paper synthesizes the perspectives of investors, lenders, and suppliers and shows that inventory turns, a commonly used metric to identify excess inventory, has limitations that reduce its utility for all these stakeholders. This paper presents a new metric, adjusted inventory turns, which overcomes the drawbacks of inventory turns and can be uniformly utilized by all stakeholders to assess whether a retailer is carrying too much or too little inventory. We explain applications of the metric with examples and lay out prescriptions for retailers.

Keywords: Financial Condition; Retail Industry;

Format: Print

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Citation:

Gaur, Vishal, Saravanan Kesavan, and Ananth Raman. "Retail Inventory: Managing the Canary in the Coal Mine!" California Management Review 56, no. 2 (Winter 2014): 55–76.

In 2016, David Hysong, at age 27, found out he had a rare, incurable cancer. Rather than wait around to die, Hysong, a recent graduate of Harvard Divinity School, decided to launch a biotechnology company called Shepherd Therapeutics to development treatments for his and other rare cancers. Two years later, the company had several drugs in promising stages of development but were at least 3 to 5 years away from commercialization, if they made it through clinical trials successfully. Only about 4% of drugs that enter clinical trials receive U.S. FDA approval. It is October 2018, and Shepherd is running out of money. Hysong needs to raise $5 million to fund operations for 2019 and at least $20 million for the following few years. But the company is too early to attract the type of venture capital he needs. Even if he got financing, Hysong worried that the company’s mission could be compromised by investors more interested in a return on their investment than saving lives, and he worried about the scaling challenges ahead.

This paper introduces methods for increasing the efficiency of retail store liquidation, which we define as the time-constrained divestment of retail outlets through an in-store sale of inventory. The retail industry depends extensively on liquidation, not only as a means for investors to recover capital from failed ventures, but also to allow managers of going concerns to divest stores in efforts to enhance performance and to change strategy. The operations literature has examined product liquidation, but retail store liquidation differs significantly. This paper augments the literature by introducing techniques for improving operating decisions during retail store liquidations and by demonstrating the performance of these methods in the field.

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Retail Inventory: Managing the Canary in the Coal Mine!

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