Home · Stockout · BigQuery · Head of Procurement

Home stockout from BigQuery, briefed to procurement

Know before the shelf empties. Ward runs it on BigQuery data across your home footprint, scoped to procurement.

The full picture: home stockout, BigQuery data, Procurement decisions

Merchandising wants Ward. You sign the contract. Ward pulls forward the indicators that change a procurement decision.

Stockout Prediction is a finding type Ward runs continuously. Ward detects SKUs trending toward zero-on-hand and alerts your team with replenishment recommendations before customers notice.

A Home Improvement operator is continuous review 50,000+ SKUs across stores. Project-based purchasing, long-tail SKUs, and seasonal volatility. Ward manages the complexity of 50,000+ SKU environments with ease.

The mechanism. Ward analyzes sell-through velocity, current inventory levels, lead times, and supplier reliability to predict stockouts 24-72 hours before they occur.

How the connection works. Service account with BigQuery Data Viewer role. Ward runs read-only SQL queries on your schedule.

Capabilities

  • Reduce lost sales by catching gaps early
  • Automated replenishment recommendations
  • Supplier-aware lead time modeling
  • Priority ranking by revenue impact
app.getward.ai Live demo
Acme Home @Merchandising: Seasonal Analyst claude-sonnet default
A

Chat

Ask anything. Ward routes to the right agent and returns cited answers.

Why did the spring mulch pre-build miss in the Southeast?
You · 9:42 AM
Schema Scout · routed to Merchandising Agent

I pulled the spring pre-build against the last three seasons and the weather signal for the 22 Southeast stores.

SignalFinding
seasonal_prebuildMulch on-hand hit 61% of plan the week temps broke 70°F
dc_pushDC push started 9 days after the first-warm-week trigger, LY it was 2
attach.projectSoil and edging attach fell 18% at stores that gapped on mulch

Recommend: tie the push trigger to the 10-day forecast instead of the calendar week, pre-position two truckloads at the 8 stores that gapped, and re-set the attach endcap.

9 parallel queries 4 sources cited confidence 0.88
Which stores get the pre-position first?
You · 9:43 AM
Supply Chain Agent · ranking stores
Querying seasonal_prebuild
Ask anything, Ward routes to the right agent. Cmd+K

Reporting

Pinned views built from saved data-lake queries. Every number re-derivable from its SQL.

7d13w52w
Revenue vs. plan
$57.3M
+2.9% WoW
Gross margin, seasonal
31.2%
−2.4pp
Mulch on-hand vs plan
61.4%
−18pp
Special order cycle time
11.6 d
+3.1 days
Revenue vs. plan 13 weeks actual, 6 weeks forecast, 80% interval
Actual Forecast 80% interval
% of plan 106 94 100 forecast → W−13 W−5 today +6wk
Holt-Winters + weather regressor MAPE 4.1% at 4wk Backtested 24 months Crosses plan in 3 weeks
Forecast error by horizon MAPE, 24-month backtest
1wk 2.1%
2wk 3.0%
4wk 4.1%
8wk 6.3%
13wk 8.9%
Accuracy bar for promo decisions: ≤5% at 4wk
Models in production Every forecast ships a model card
ModelHorizonMAPE
holt_winters4wk4.1%
arima_sarimax13wk8.9%
gbm_demand1wk2.1%
bayes_hiernew store11.4%

Sources

Connect external systems to the data lake.

NameTypeLast sync
epicor_pos_transactionsimport2m ago
epicor_special_ordersimport2m ago
netsuite_inventory_snapshotimport14m ago
retail_seasonal_prebuildimport1h ago
retail_sku_velocityimport1h ago
retail_pro_account_salesimport1h ago
retail_weather_dailyimport1h ago

Policies

Browse and manage Cedar access policies for your tenant.

TLS 1.3 AES-256 Read-only SOC 2 II
Policy IDEffectResources
merch-read-defaultpermitModel::*
pro-team-read-accountspermitModel::"pro_account_sales"
vendor-blockedforbidModel::"labor_*"
supply-read-orderspermitModel::"special_orders"
Stockout for Home on BigQuery data, live product demo.

Why Stockout matters for Home retail

A missing grout SKU doesn't just lose a grout sale, it kills the entire tile project basket. Ward models project basket dependencies and scores stockout predictions by basket-impact, prioritizing replenishment on the items with the highest project-abandonment risk.

What Ward has eyes on.

Ward ingests BigQuery rather than replacing it. Any BigQuery dataset, gA4 event exports, ads data transfers come across on a read-only connection, get enriched with contextual data, and come back as insight cards. Your Data Platform is untouched.

The stockout model runs on a daily cycle, not on a reporting calendar. It catches the pattern, accounts for the driver, and attaches a recommended action before the number reaches a review deck.

Ward tracks 50,000+ SKUs over your stores, at the store-category level rather than the chain roll-up. The metrics under watch include project basket value, seasonal accuracy, long-tail turn. A roll-up hides a single-store problem inside a healthy average, which is how project basket identification stays invisible for a quarter.

At the metric level. Ward accounts for project basket dependencies, seasonal demand curves, Pro customer bulk patterns, and the outsized revenue impact of missing a low-cost component that completes a high-value project.

Signals · POS at SKU-store-day with basket linkage, Pro account purchase tagging where available, seasonal demand history with weather features, and supplier lead time history.

Why this combination
is its own problem.

A Head of Procurement in home retail owns numbers that move faster than the reporting cycle that covers them. Project basket value, seasonal accuracy, long-tail turn shift store by store, every morning. A monthly pack cannot represent that. Merchandising wants Ward. You sign the contract.

  • 01 Pro customer bulk orders aren't modeled separately from DIY single-unit demand; a Pro pulling 50 units of fastener creates a stockout that DIY-grade replenishment can't cover.
  • 02 Seasonal spring/summer surges are modeled by chain-wide curves that miss the regional weather variance, Northeast deck season starts 4-6 weeks after Southeast.

Benchmarks. Home improvement project basket abandonment: a missing $5 component routinely costs $150-400 in lost project basket revenue. Pro customer baskets average 3-8x DIY size and have markedly different replenishment urgency.

What the first 90 days
actually look like.

  1. 01

    Week 1: read-only connection

    Ward sits on top of Google BigQuery with read-only credentials and begins ingesting any BigQuery dataset and gA4 event exports. No config changes on your side. First cards arrive inside the first 48 hours.

  2. 02

    Weeks 2 to 3: baselines

    Ward needs roughly two weeks of history per store to separate a real deviation from normal variance. During this window the cards are directionally right and the thresholds are still moving.

  3. 03

    Weeks 4 to 12: steady state

    Ward hands you insight cards each day, each with what caused it and a recommended move. Volume settles at a level a single person can read over coffee. The measure of success is not how many findings arrive, it is how many get acted on.

How Ward connects to Google BigQuery

Ward queries BigQuery using your existing datasets. GA4 exports, POS data, CRM exports. Ward reads it where it lives.

Setup: Service account with BigQuery Data Viewer role. Ward runs read-only SQL queries on your schedule.

Data Ward reads from BigQuery

Any BigQuery dataset
GA4 event exports
Ads data transfers
Custom ETL outputs

Impact metrics with BigQuery

Time to Insight
No staging required
GA4, POS, and CRM datasets queried in place.
Marketing Attribution
Online-offline linked
GA4 events joined with in-store POS to close attribution gaps.
Data Activation
Historical data made queryable
Years of unqueried BigQuery data brought into analysis.
Anomaly Detection Speed
Always-on monitoring
Deviations caught between scheduled dashboard reviews.

Data lake enrichment

Ward enriches BigQuery data with: Any BigQuery dataset, GA4 event exports, Weather & events, Demographics, Custom feeds

Merchandising wants Ward. You sign the contract.

Pain points
  • ×Business sponsor saw the demo. You have a week to vet a vendor you didn't pick
  • ×AI vendors price by seats and tokens. Total cost is unknowable until invoice three
  • ×Multi-year commits with auto-renew. No exit if the pilot stalls
  • ×Renewals come back 30% higher, with no room to push back and no benchmark to cite
  • ×Security and DPA reviews start after the team has already committed
How Ward helps
  • MSA, DPA, SOC 2 Type II underway, and architecture review available before signature
  • Month-to-month contracts. No multi-year lock-in. No auto-renew traps
  • Transparent pricing set by scope and store count
  • 14-day insight guarantee. If Ward doesn't deliver, month two is on us
  • AI strategy, orchestration and reporting-layer work in enterprise grocery at nine-figure revenue. Reference calls available before signature

Enterprise SaaS spend grew 18% YoY. 53% of subscriptions are underused or duplicative. Source: Gartner

Home KPI impact

Seasonal Accuracy
Weather + event driven
Pre-positioning adjusted for peak season signals.
Long-Tail Turn
Dead weight separated
Which tail SKUs serve project needs vs sit idle.
Project Basket Value
Cross-sell surfaced
Project purchasing patterns drive attachment.
Inventory Carrying Cost
Capital freed
Demand forecasting reduces slow-moving overstock.

Frequently asked questions

Ward detects SKUs trending toward zero-on-hand and alerts your team with replenishment recommendations before customers notice. For Home retail specifically, Ward monitors 50,000+ SKUs across your stores and delivers automated insight cards with root cause analysis and recommended actions.

Ward tracks Project basket value, Seasonal accuracy, Long-tail turn, Pro customer share, Attachment rate at the store-category level. Ward analyzes sell-through velocity, current inventory levels, lead times, and supplier reliability to predict stockouts 24-72 hours before they occur.

Service account with BigQuery Data Viewer role. Ward runs read-only SQL queries on your schedule. Data points include: Any BigQuery dataset, GA4 event exports, Ads data transfers, Custom ETL outputs.

Yes. Ward reads BigQuery data and combines it with contextual signals (weather, events, demographics) to generate Home-specific insight cards. No custom development required.

Merchandising wants Ward. You sign the contract. Ward solves this with automated insight cards: MSA, DPA, SOC 2 Type II underway, and architecture review available before signature. Month-to-month contracts. No multi-year lock-in. No auto-renew traps. Transparent pricing set by scope and store count.

Ward delivers daily insight cards covering Project basket value, Seasonal accuracy, Long-tail turn, tailored for Procurement decision-making. Each card includes what changed, why it matters, and what to do next.

Ward accounts for project basket dependencies, seasonal demand curves, Pro customer bulk patterns, and the outsized revenue impact of missing a low-cost component that completes a high-value project.

Ward detects a popular deck stain trending toward stockout as spring project season peaks. The insight goes beyond the stain itself: project basket analysis shows customers buying this product also purchase brushes, drop cloths, and sandpaper. Ward issues a prediction card with full basket-impact context, and the DC team expedites replenishment to protect total project basket revenue across affected stores.

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.

See what Home stockout problems Ward catches.

Root causes, not just alerts. See it on your data.

Read-only to start · your LLM keys · SOC 2 Type II underway · or book a call directly

Find out what your data has been hiding.

Tell us about your operation. We’ll show you the problems Ward catches, and the ones your current tools miss.

Step 1 of 3
What are your goals?
Step 2 of 3
About your operation
Step 3 of 3
Your contact info