FICTIONAL BUYER. Fenwick & Dale Stores and everything in this brief are invented for this example.

# Fenwick & Dale Stores: what we need

We are a regional retailer with nine shops. Shop managers order stock from their own spreadsheets, and head office only sees sales totals once a month. Managers tell us that popular lines are out of stock too often, and head office cannot tell which shops or which lines are worst.

What we want: a weekly dashboard for each shop manager showing what sold, what ran out and what is on order, and one head-office view that compares the nine shops. We hold till data, stock data and loyalty-card data in three different systems and none of them talk to each other.

What it costs us not to act: our finance team estimates that out-of-stock lines cost us in the region of 5 to 7 percent of weekly sales in our three busiest shops. That is our own estimate and we have not tested it.

Timing: we would like the first dashboards in shop managers' hands before the spring season starts in 14 weeks. We can give a half-day each week from our head of retail operations and access to all three systems.

Budget: we have set aside between 45,000 and 65,000 pounds excluding VAT for the first year, including hosting. We want the supplier to own the data connections so that our two-person IT team does not have to.