HERMES - Retail Stock Management and Replenishment Forcasting System

The Challenge

The management of the LUXE cosmetics division aimed to improve both factory ordering efficiency and on-shelf product availability across its retail network, while significantly reducing the operational effort required to support these processes.

Inventory visibility depended on heterogeneous and fragmented sources coming from multiple corporate systems as well as manual inputs. In particular, for stores without on-site L’Oréal beauty advisors, sales movements, returns, and physical inventories were captured through Excel files, increasing operational complexity and the risk of delays or inconsistencies.

Consolidating and analyzing sell-in, sell-out, returns, and inventory data required substantial manual effort, limiting the ability to respond quickly to demand shifts. As a result, decisions were often based on delayed or incomplete information.

• Limited visibility into actual store-level inventory
• Difficulty forecasting demand and planning replenishment in time
• Higher risk of out-of-stock situations for high-value LUXE products
• Significant time spent on manual consolidation and reconciliation

The organization needed a solution capable of automating data consolidation, delivering reliable near real-time inventory intelligence, and supporting advanced forecasting aligned with the operational realities of selective cosmetics retail.

The Solution

HERMES was designed as a centralized analytics platform that consolidates data from multiple enterprise and operational sources to provide reliable, near real-time visibility of retail inventory and to support forecasting and replenishment planning.

The system continuously integrates data from core corporate platforms such as SAP and Salesforce, while also supporting structured Excel-based inputs for stores without on-site L’Oréal beauty advisors. These inputs capture sell-out activity, store returns, and physical inventories to ensure full coverage across the retail network.

By unifying and correlating sell-in, sell-out, returns, and inventory data, HERMES produces both predefined operational reports and dynamic pivot-based analytics, delivering a trustworthy view of actual stock levels at store, product, and category level.

Advanced forecasting and replenishment mechanisms, based on both general and industry-specific algorithms, enable proactive inventory planning, support informed ordering decisions, and help reduce stock shortages in selective cosmetics retail.

• Multi-source integration (SAP/Salesforce) with Excel-based coverage where needed
• Near real-time reporting of actual store-level stock
• Predefined reports plus dynamic pivot analytics
• Forecasting & replenishment using industry-adapted algorithms

Key benefits

• Centralized retail inventory visibility
• Reduced out-of-stock situations
• Improved replenishment accuracy
• Significant reduction of manual workload
• Near real-time reporting and analytics
• Data-driven decision support
• Scalable forecasting framework