First, go to “Store Transfers > Create new Store Transfer”:
1) Choose how to create your scenario
The first choice the user will be given is whether to launch a scenario from scratch (“Create new executions”) or using a previous one as a baseline - where the scope, trips and parameters will already be selected - (“Select execution”):
This article will show you how to create your scenario from scratch (option 1).
2) Select Store Scope
The first step is to select the scope of stores you would like the system to take into account when creating the store transfer scenario.
You can select an automatic store category (Countries, Regions, Open Stores…), or a manual one created by the user for the specific scenario.
For categories with child categories you have the option to launch a separate execution for each child category. This may be useful in the case of running a scenario for each region within a country to generate individual store transfer scenarios.
You also have the option to edit the store category used in the scenario, provided that it is not an automatic category.
3) Select Products
After having established the store scope, we need to select the product scope that should be considered for transfer in the scenario. This screen is split into two sections. The bottom half of the screen allows you to search and filter for all products to select which should be included in the scenario.
Here, filters for the following product attributes can be set by default:
- Category
- Family
- Season
- Section
ℹ️ In case the user would need extra filters by categories created on the platform, they can contact the Nextail team to include them.
The user can also set Advanced Criteria to further restrict the search for products - this includes:
- Sell-through rate
- Stock out rate
- Stock units
- Warehouse scarcity
- Warehouse coverage
- Price range
The advanced criteria is useful in further restricting and tailoring the selection of products to include in the store transfer according to the strategic needs of the business. You can target certain products that are selling well, or that are often running out of stock through the Sell-Through and Stock-Out rates.
You can furthermore target specific products that may be running low in the warehouse through the Warehouse Scarcity and Warehouse Coverage filters, and Stock Units can also be used to target products that have a large number of units sitting in stores that may not be selling very well where they are.
Once the desired list of products is filtered in the table of the lower half of the screen, the user can make the selection of products to include in the scenario using the checkboxes in the table, or select all the products with the checkbox next to “PRODUCT” in the grey area from the table. From there to confirm the selection, click "Apply Changes" to bring them into the table within the top half of the screen.
This process of filtering for relevant products in the bottom table and bringing them to the top table can be repeated until all the products that are to be considered in the store transfer are included. This allows to select a wide range of products belonging to various product categories, families, seasons and with different retail characteristics such as sell-through, stock out, warehouse scarcity, and coverage.
ℹ️ Keep in mind that this selection of products is just for indicating the system which products to consider for the calculation, but then if they are proposed or not, will depend on the demand, stock and needs of each store, apart from the optimization parameters. This means that, even if 1000 products are selected in this screen, only 200 could be proposed to be transferred.
⚠️There is a limit on the number of store-product combinations that are allowed as part of a store transfer scenario. This is set to 300,000 store-product combinations and applies at tenant level to all scenarios.
4) Configure Trips
Once you have your complete selection of products in the top table, select continue to proceed to the Configure Trips Screen. This page allows you to configure the trips that should take place between the stores within the scope of the scenario.
For example, if you only want to allow trips between stores within a geographical area or between a selection of individual stores that you are targeting for store transfer, this can be configured in the Allowed Trips section.
You can search for all store categories within the system or likewise search for individual origin and destination stores. You can set multiple configurations of allowed trips to ensure that you cover multiple possibilities of restrictions on transfers between stores.
Inversely, you can also forbid transfers between specific store categories, or individual stores as well in the forbidden trips section.
This functionality has several use cases, for example:
- To ensure that certain flagship stores or online stores are not included in the store transfer scenario to maintain their stock levels as is.
- To protect stock from newly opened stores.
- To avoid targeting certain stores that are being replenished from the warehouse.
Likewise this can be set for entire store categories or individual stores to exclude them from the scenario. Read more about trips configuration and empty stock here.
5) Calculate Store Transfer
Once you have configured your required restrictions on trips within the scenario, select “Continue” to proceed to the final screen in the process: Calculate Store Transfer. Here you can set the forecast and optimisation parameters that allow you to precisely configure key features of Store Transfers.
The first set of parameters relates to the Forecast - that is basically the Planning horizon to cover with the proposed quantities. We can see that it is divided in two:
- The number of days the units will be in transfer to reach their destinations from their origin stores (an average number for the lead time between all stores).
- The number of days to cover the demand in stores with the units proposed in the scenario.
The user will have to insert the total days, and the days in transfer, and the system then calculates for you the number of days the units will spend in stores as part of the scenario by subtracting the Days in Transfer from the Planning Horizon.
Furthermore you have the set of Optimisation Parameters, which are used to influence the number and quality of trips that will be generated as part of the scenario.
- Min ESI by Trip
- Number of Trips
- Merchandising Weight
- Efficiency Threshold.
- Operational Effort per Unit
Finally, we find the set of Advanced Parameters related to blocks, that allow further capability in setting restrictions on the transfers included in the scenario:
- Apply Replenishment Blocks
- Block recently moved products
- Block recently introduced products
ℹ️ To read more about these parameters, go to the article dedicated to Efficiency parameters in this course.
Once you have set all these parameters, to launch the scenario select "Calculate" in the bottom right of the screen. That will begin the calculation of the store transfer scenario, from which you can then track its status in the Store Transfers > View Past Scenarios, and review the results once it shows as 
Ultimately, this step-by-step process should help to execute Store Transfers effectively, benefitting from increases in likelihood of sales.
