Data science solutions for retail strategy to reduce waste keeping high profit

Author

Sakoda, Gen and Takayasu, Hideki and Takayasu, Misako

Abstract

Waste reduction in retail is a fundamental problem for sustainability. Among waste reduction approaches such as recycling and donation, stock management based on demand estimation which leads to mitigate waste generation and maintain a high profit is expected to play an important role. However, demand estimation is generally difficult because fluctuations in sales are quite volatile, and stock-out leads to incomplete demand observation. Here, we propose data science solutions to estimate non-stationary demand with censored sales data including stock-outs and realize scientific stock management. Concretely, we extend a non-stationary time series analysis method based on Particle Filter to handle censored data, and combine it with the newsvendor problem formula to determine the optimal stock. Moreover, we provide a way of pricing waste reduction costs. A method to verify consistency between the statistical model and sales data is also proposed. Numerical analysis using actual Point-Of-Sales data in convenience stores shows food waste could be reduced several tenths percent keeping high profits in most cases. Specifically, in cases of foods disposed of frequently about 75\% of working days, food waste decreases to about a quarter with the profit increases by about 140\%. The way of pricing waste reduction costs tells new insights such as 27\% waste reduction is achieved by 1\% profit loss. Our method provides a practical solution for food waste reduction in the retail sector.