Is it worth replacing the buyer's spreadsheet with automated forecasting?

For a 20 to 50 store chain, yes, but one category first, not the whole chain at once. The spreadsheet is not the problem. The problem is that it fits only in one person’s head, and that person takes vacation.

Automated forecasting wins when three things are true. The history separates sales from shelf-out. The category has enough volume for the pattern to show. And the buyer joins the criterion, instead of receiving a finished number and distrusting it.

The most common exception is the one that surprises leadership most. When the buyer’s spreadsheet carries knowledge the system does not have, about the supplier who runs late, the regional holiday, the roadwork on the avenue, the system alone misses more than the spreadsheet. Then the answer is not to replace it. It is to capture what the buyer knows and feed that to the model as an input. Throw the spreadsheet away and you lose the cheapest asset you have.

What you can do this week costs nothing. Take the category that gives you the most grief and measure its shelf-out by day of week, for four weeks. That is the data missing from most replenishment decisions, and the same data that misleads in stock cover when read as an average. Without it, you do not know whether the spreadsheet is missing or hitting. It is the kind of problem you solve with criterion before software.

If you are in this decision and want a second read, send me the shape of your case in one sentence, chain size and category. I will send back a paragraph within a business day: agree, disagree, or “depends, here is the missing question”. No calendar, no call. If a project shape surfaces, we talk.