Fill Rate Monitoring for Furniture on Epicor, built for merchandising
Your category managers are drowning in spreadsheets. Ward spots furniture fill rate movement in your Epicor data before it compounds, with root cause and the next step attached.
The full picture: furniture fill rate, Epicor data, Merchandising decisions
Your category managers are drowning in spreadsheets. Ward pulls forward the readings that change a merchandising decision.
Fill Rate Monitoring is a card type Ward runs continuously. Ward monitors on-shelf availability across your entire estate and flags stores or categories dropping below threshold.
Furniture Manufacturing & Retail changes the scale of the problem: 10,000+ SKUs, every one of your locations. ERP-locked production data, long lead times, and margin erosion you don't see until quarter-end. Ward connects your internal systems and surfaces what matters.
What Ward does with that: Ward tracks expected vs actual on-shelf availability at the store-category level and escalates when fill rate drops below configurable thresholds.
How the connection works. Ward connects via Epicor REST API. Compatible with Epicor Prophet 21 and Epicor Eclipse.
What it does
- Category-level drill-down
- Estate-wide fill rate dashboard
- Threshold-based alerting
- Store-vs-estate benchmarking
Chat
Ask anything. Ward routes to the right agent and returns cited answers.
I pulled upholstery cost of goods by BOM line against the last price file. Three quarters of the drop is material and freight, not discounting.
| Signal | Finding |
|---|---|
bom_cost_actuals | Foam and frame stock +9.2% since the March price file, never carried to list |
freight.inbound | Inbound container cost +$412 per unit-equivalent on the Vietnam lane |
channel.mix | Wholesale share up 6pp, and wholesale runs 11pp under DTC margin |
Recommend: reprice the six affected SKUs at the next list cycle, quote the alternate foam vendor, and hold wholesale allocation flat until list catches up.
bom_cost_actuals…
Reporting
Pinned views built from saved data-lake queries. Every number re-derivable from its SQL.
| Model | Horizon | MAPE |
|---|---|---|
holt_winters | 4wk | 4.1% |
arima_sarimax | 13wk | 8.9% |
gbm_demand | 1wk | 2.1% |
bayes_hier | new store | 11.4% |
Sources
Connect external systems to the data lake.
| Name | Type | Last sync |
|---|---|---|
epicor_production_stage_log | import | 2m ago |
epicor_bom_cost_actuals | import | 2m ago |
sap_inventory_snapshot | import | 14m ago |
netsuite_sales_orders | import | 1h ago |
retail_showroom_pos | import | 1h ago |
retail_freight_inbound | import | 1h ago |
retail_dealer_orders | import | 1h ago |
Policies
Browse and manage Cedar access policies for your tenant.
| Policy ID | Effect | Resources |
|---|---|---|
finance-read-default | permit | Model::* |
sourcing-read-bom | permit | Model::"bom_cost_actuals" |
dealer-blocked | forbid | Model::"bom_*" |
plant-read-production | permit | Model::"production_stage_log" |
Why Fill Rate matters for Furniture retail
For furniture, fill rate is really order completeness at delivery. A bedroom set that arrives without its nightstand is not a partial win, it is a rescheduled delivery, a second freight leg, and a customer who waits weeks for the missing piece. Ward monitors complete-order fill rate at the set and delivery level, flagging the components that break a multi-piece order before the truck is loaded.
Why this combination
is its own problem.
Epicor is the system of record for most furniture operators of your size, which means the inputs Ward needs are already there. The gap is not data collection. It is that nobody has time to read sales orders and inventory every morning throughout every store.
- 01 Fill rate is measured per SKU, hiding that a multi-piece set has a much lower complete-order availability than any individual component suggests.
- 02 A single low-availability component silently gates dozens of otherwise-complete orders, but never stands out in an item-level report.
Benchmarks. Complete-order fill on multi-piece furniture sets typically runs well below the item-level number; a chain reading 95% per SKU may sit near 82 to 88% on complete sets. Each incomplete set that triggers a second delivery leg commonly adds meaningful last-mile cost and pushes customer wait out by weeks.
What Ward has eyes on.
Ward pulls from sales orders, inventory, purchase orders from Epicor on a read-only connection. Nothing is written back, and your ERP configuration does not change. Epicor stays the system of record.
Every empty shelf is a lost sale. Ward runs the model continuously rather than on a reporting cycle, which is why a finding lands the morning the pattern starts instead of at the end of the period.
Ward watches 10,000+ SKUs over your locations, at the store-category level rather than the chain roll-up. The metrics under watch include inventory carrying cost, order-to-delivery cycle, gross margin by channel. A roll-up hides a single-store problem inside a healthy average, which is how disconnected ERP, warehouse, and POS systems stays invisible for a quarter.
At the metric level. Ward tracks complete-order and complete-set fill rate, component availability weighted by how many orders each component gates, and reschedule and split-delivery rates by DC. Because furniture ships as sets, the right metric is whether the whole order is deliverable, not whether any single SKU is in stock.
What the first 90 days
actually look like.
-
01
Week 1: read-only connection
Ward connects to Epicor with read-only credentials and begins ingesting sales orders and inventory. No config changes on your side. First findings arrive inside the first 48 hours.
-
02
Weeks 2 to 3: calibration
Baselines stabilize per store and per category. Ward stops flagging normal variance and starts flagging exceptions. This is the window where the false positive rate drops sharply.
-
03
Weeks 4 to 12: operating rhythm
Daily cards arrive each day and get triaged like any other queue. Most teams find the volume settles into something one person clears in ten minutes. What matters is the action rate, not the alert count.
How Ward connects to Epicor
Ward integrates with Epicor for home improvement, furniture, and building supply retailers. Inventory, purchasing, production, and sales data power insight cards.
Setup: Ward connects via Epicor REST API. Compatible with Epicor Prophet 21 and Epicor Eclipse.
Data Ward reads from Epicor
Impact metrics with Epicor
Data lake enrichment
Ward enriches Epicor data with: Sales orders, Weather & events, Contractor/Pro data, Competitor pricing, Vendor scorecards
Your category managers are drowning in spreadsheets.
- ×Promo planning still runs off last year's playbook
- ×Assortment reviews happen quarterly when they should happen daily
- ×Price changes chase the market a week behind it
- ×No visibility into true cannibalization across categories
- ×Vendor negotiations lack real-time sell-through evidence
- ✓Insight cards flag promo cannibalization the day it happens
- ✓Assortment gaps and whitespace opportunities surface automatically
- ✓Price elasticity shifts detected before margin erosion compounds
- ✓Category-level performance cards replace manual spreadsheet reviews
- ✓Vendor scorecards generated from actual fill rate and quality data
Retailers lose an estimated $300B+ annually to suboptimal assortment and promotional decisions. Source: McKinsey & Company
Furniture KPI impact
Frequently asked questions
Ward monitors on-shelf availability across your entire estate and flags stores or categories dropping below threshold. For Furniture retail specifically, Ward monitors 10,000+ SKUs across your locations and delivers automated insight cards with root cause analysis and recommended actions.
Ward tracks Inventory carrying cost, Order-to-delivery cycle, Gross margin by channel, Raw material cost variance, Custom order cycle time at the store-category level. Ward tracks expected vs actual on-shelf availability at the store-category level and escalates when fill rate drops below configurable thresholds.
Ward connects via Epicor REST API. Compatible with Epicor Prophet 21 and Epicor Eclipse. Data points include: Sales orders, Inventory, Purchase orders, Customer accounts, Pricing tiers, Vendor performance.
Yes. Ward reads Epicor data and combines it with contextual signals (weather, events, demographics) to generate Furniture-specific insight cards. No custom development required.
Your category managers are drowning in spreadsheets. Ward solves this with automated insight cards: Insight cards flag promo cannibalization the day it happens. Assortment gaps and whitespace opportunities surface automatically. Price elasticity shifts detected before margin erosion compounds.
Ward delivers daily insight cards covering Inventory carrying cost, Order-to-delivery cycle, Gross margin by channel, tailored for Merchandising decision-making. Each card includes what changed, why it matters, and what to do next.
Ward tracks complete-order and complete-set fill rate, component availability weighted by how many orders each component gates, and reschedule and split-delivery rates by DC. Because furniture ships as sets, the right metric is whether the whole order is deliverable, not whether any single SKU is in stock.
Estate-level item fill rate reads a healthy 95%, but delivery reschedules are climbing. Ward measures fill at the order-and-set level and shows that multi-piece bedroom and dining sets are shipping incomplete because one component, usually a backordered nightstand or a specific chair, is missing. A single low-availability component fails the whole order. Ward flags the at-risk sets before dispatch and recommends holding for completion or splitting the delivery, cutting the second-truck cost and the customer wait.
First insight cards arrive within 48 hours of data connection. Ward needs approximately 2 weeks to establish stable baselines for your specific operation.
No. Ward sits on top of your existing stack. It is the proactive intelligence layer that watches your data continuously and delivers insight cards, so your team acts on findings instead of hunting for them.
Related solutions
See what Furniture fill rate problems Ward catches.
Root causes, not just alerts. See it on your data.
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