Over the last 15 years or so, the rapidly declining cost of storing information has been a real godsend. This trend, coupled with the use of barcode checkout scanners have allowed retailers to build a treasure trove of daily consumer demand information for each and every product, right down to store level.

Some sophisticated retailers even keep a date stamped accounting of store level receipts and perpetual inventory balances for each stocking location as well. With this kind of data, it’s actually possible to reconstruct the history of every movement of product from the manufacturing plant to the customer’s hands.

However, the sheer volume of information makes it difficult to glean anything useful from it on an ongoing basis. Sure, you may occasionally run some regional analysis on a promotion or look at end-of-season stock levels for a group of stores, but you’re really only using a small fraction of the information that’s available.

When it comes to storing electronic information, the prevailing wisdom seems to be that “it’s better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it”.

At the risk of stating the obvious, what would really be useful is the exact same level of information, updated every day, except with date stamps that are in the future, not the past. Having a rich history is wonderful, but you can't really use it to run your business - any more than you could drive your car by looking in the rear view mirror.

While it’s nice to know how many units of each item you’ve sold daily in each store over the last several months, wouldn’t you much rather know how much you will sell each day several months into the future? That sure would make it easy to figure out when you’ll need to replenish the shelves!

An historical record of inventory balances for every item at every stocking location is great information to have. But wouldn’t it be much more useful to know what your inventory will be three days from now? Or three weeks? Or three months? If you had this information far enough in advance, you could virtually eliminate seasonal carryover and overstocks!

Keeping all inventory movements for the last year can help you to figure out “what went where”. But what if you had a data warehouse that could tell you what’s going to move between any pair of nodes every day for a year into the future? You could do detailed capacity, transportation, manpower and cash flow planning by just converting to the appropriate unit of measure and adding up the numbers!

Imagine it - a data warehouse that tells the future at the same level of granularity as a traditional data warehouse – by product by day in units at any location.

But can such a thing even exist?

Believe it or not, by using the Flowcasting business process to make full use of what’s in your traditional data warehouse, it is possible to generate a daily simulation of POS sales, shipments, receipts and inventory balances at every location (stores, DCs and factories) in the supply chain – a full year into the future.

The results clearly show that retailers who use time-phased planning to unlock the full value of their data warehouses will have a significant competitive advantage over those who choose to wait.