Founded in 2014, NextOrbit is a cloud platform to predict and mitigate Out-of-Stock in Retail. This platform produces on-demand, daily and weekly predictions of SKUs which will be going out-of-stock by store location, date, and time. It provides alerts about the quantity by which the store ordering needs to be updated. NextOrbit is headquartered in Frisco TX with its product development center in Bangalore, India.
Services Proffered by NextOrbit
The NextOrbit platform enhances the operational effectiveness of a Retailer’s merchandising and planning. This platform helps discover and service latent demand. The primary feature of NextOrbit is a granular understanding of out-of-stock of each item, at each store every day.
NextOrbit predicts out-of-stock enabling a Retailer to take proactive action before losing sales and impacting the customer experience. The store allocations created by NextOrbit enables right-stocking of products to meet full price customer demand, no more and no less.
The demand forecasts created by NextOrbit, especially for the fashion industry, enable procurement/manufacturing of the right quantity of each product to maximize full price sell through, and minimize markdowns. The early warning signals of their fashion platform enable the Retailers to understand how a new product is behaving. Their OOS (out-of-stock) alerts enable store staff to effectively replenish store shelves in a way to meet customer demand.
The Transformation Artist
Kishore Rajgopal, Founder & CEO of NextOrbit, represents the spirit of enthusiasm, perseverance, and inspirational leadership to build startups that impact businesses and society.
Kishore holds a master’s degree in Industrial Management and a bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering both from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, India.
Kishore understood the power of Data Sciences and Predictive Analytics to transform the way businesses run. He saw the endemic problem of out-of-stock in the Retail Industry. As retailing is all about creating the “moment of truth” so all the efforts in creating the moment of truth are of no use if the product is not available on the shelf or on the website when the customer needs it. Kishore and the team crafted the algorithms and models to predict when an item will go out-of-stock. This enables retailers to be proactive in merchandising their products on their shelves or their websites.
Understanding and addressing a lost opportunity and latent demand is critical for retailers, now more than ever. Kishore believes that retailers can enhance same-store-sales by 4-10% by mitigating out-of-stock. The opportunity for fashion and apparel Retail is even larger. Critical to the NextOrbit is the cloud platform that crunches not only data from the retailer, but also external variables such as local events, holidays, weather, and growth of the local economy.
Kishore sees NextOrbit growing like a bamboo tree. The company wants to build foundations that too rock solid platform with successful onboard clients. The company wants to obtain testimonials. And according to Kishore, a typical testimonial will be like:
“Because of NextOrbit and a supportive team we have improved same store sales by 12% and enhanced full price sell through to 90%. Their diagnostic helps us to understand the extent of the lost opportunity we were sitting on. Their OOS alerts make us get the store shelves with fewer staff. Yes. It is not as if US retailers have less staff. It is just that they do not have data-driven tools to help them in the job of replenishing shelves – a boring but most important work”
Once the foundations are building, Kishore just wants to see the company growing and scaling rapidly.
Strength and Forte
NextOrbit is headed to creating a unique category. They believe that the genre of the product they are envisioning does not exist today. Creating a category requires leading with thought leadership, working closely with academia, creating a global brand and a brand that creates pull demand. They see themselves creating IP, being written about in well-known publications and obtaining patents.
The Clientele
Most Retailer systems focus on transaction execution. The intelligence element is often weak. The biggest benefit that NextOrbit’s clients see is improved customer experience and loyalty. Clients often see a same-store-sales improvement of between 4 to 10% and store inventory reduction of 5-10%. And on a continuous basis, NextOrbit ensure optimal operations and foundations for scaling Retailer operations.
Future Perspective
As the CEO of NextOrbit, Kishore sees NextOrbit becoming a cloud system of record for most Retailers worldwide. The synergy arising from such a situation will be tremendous, and the value created will be shared by all parties – Retailers, CP brands and others. Kishore created the change by leading from the front, constantly in touch with clients, understand true client needs, ensuring that it gets baked into the platform and most of all are to hire and inspire a good team.
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