Track: Supply Chain

Abstract

This paper presents a mobile application to monitor on shelf availability. The application has been developed to respond to the request of one of the biggest FMCG companies in EGYPT. The application role is to monitor the availability of the SKU’s on the shelves of the retail stores and to update the availability sheets at the managers ‘end online.  The application, fed by the company’s SKUs in the retail stores, is installed on the supervisors' android phones, and is synchronized online with Excel sheets on the supply chain managers devices. Once an SKU decreases and reaches an out-of-stock (OOS) predefined level the supervisor updates the appropriate cell in the application screen on his mobile phone, this new level is automatically transferred to the excel sheet at the manager’s files. The replenishment decision can be taken immediately. The application developed has been applied to monitor the SKUs in thirty retail stores all over Egypt in time with simple, cheap and easy to use application on android Smartphones. The application improved the supply chain performance at a minimal cost and eliminated the probability of SKUs to become OOS.