Quantifying shelf-out-of-stock in fashion & apparel retail stores

Failures occurring in each logistic chain node inevitably affect products availability in storage and distribution points, leading to stock-outs and subsequent customer dissatisfaction. Dealing with retailers which sell to final consumers, the economic estimation of the Shelf Out-of-Stock (OOS) loss is notoriously challenging. Moreover, in fashion and apparel stores, it is even difficult to estimate the size of OOS: due to the fickleness of the shopper, a OOS condition may even not lead to a lost sale. This paper focuses on the verification of the occurrence of out-of-stock events in fashion stores, aiming to get a quantitative evaluation of the potential lost sales through the analysis of the number of days of products unavailability. The number of OOS events due to early stock depletion will be consequently calculated, along with their consequences. The proposed procedure has been validated on real data of an important Italian fashion company