This framework is developed by a team of former McKinsey and Big 4 consultants. The presentation follows the headline-body-bumper slide format used by global consulting firms.
This product (Item-based Management [Tanpin Kanri]) is a 35-slide PPT PowerPoint presentation slide deck (PPTX), which you can download immediately upon purchase.
Most retail organizations still rely on centralized, category-driven inventory planning models. These systems overlook local context, suppress frontline insight, and often mismatch product availability with customer needs. The result: overstocked shelves filled with irrelevant items and missed sales opportunities for what customers want.
Item-Based Management (IBM) also known as Tanpin Kanri, developed by 7-Eleven Japan, solves this problem. It empowers store staff to treat every product as a unique demand signal. Rather than relying on macro-level forecasts, teams observe customer behavior at the ground level and adapt SKU selection daily.
IBM empowers Retail teams to shape inventory decisions based on real-world demand—not static category plans.
In this PPT presentation, we discuss the 3-step Tanpin Hanri Cycle:
1. Observe: Monitor customer behavior, shelf interactions, and foot traffic
2. Hypothesize and Act: Order or adjust SKUs based on live observations
3. Review and Refine: Use POS feedback to validate decisions and improve
We also discuss the 4 core principles of Tanpin Hanri:
1. Local demand as the driver of inventory decisions
2. SKU-level hypothesis testing and daily merchandising cycles
3. Empowerment of frontline staff to lead assortment planning
4. Continuous learning through POS feedback and customer data
Other topics covered include comparison of Item-Based Management with Category-Based Management, scaling across Retail channels, a case study, among others.
This PowerPoint presentation on Item-Based Management and Tanpin Kanri also includes slide templates for you to use in your own business presentations.
This PPT slide presents a detailed overview of the Tanpin Kanri Cycle, a three-step store-level process designed to enhance store responsiveness and agility. It emphasizes how rigid planning constraints limit frontline adaptability and introduces the cycle as a dynamic alternative. The cycle comprises 3 key phases: Observe, Hypothesize and Act, and Review and Refine. During the Observe phase, staff monitor real-time customer behaviors, shelf traffic, weather, and other signals to gather immediate insights. The Hypothesize and Act phase involves interpreting these observations, translating them into small product adjustments or display changes. The final phase, Review and Refine, assesses the outcomes against sales data, enabling adjustments for the next day. The cycle's core strength lies in its rapid feedback loop, often completed within 24 hours, allowing stores to respond swiftly to shifting demand. The slide underscores that this approach replaces traditional centralized directives with store-level actions, fostering a more responsive environment. The visual layout with numbered steps and icons clarifies the process, while the side note highlights the importance of speed and iterative responses in retail operations. The blue banner at the bottom references a broader item-based management framework, suggesting this cycle as part of a larger strategy to optimize inventory and demand insights. Overall, the slide communicates that adopting this cycle empowers staff to make real-time decisions, ultimately improving store performance and customer satisfaction through continuous, data-driven adjustments.
This PPT slide discusses how static SKU planning often fails to adapt to local market shifts, highlighting Tanpin Kanri's approach to rapid merchandising updates through high-frequency SKU optimization. It emphasizes that Tanpin Kanri fosters a continuous testing environment at the store level, where staff make small, data-informed adjustments to SKU placement, quantity, and bundling based on immediate sales results. This approach replaces traditional static plans with dynamic, real-time decision-making. The key elements include frequent adjustments driven by daily sales outcomes, micro-level testing of product mix and placement, and data-driven feedback loops that refine stock decisions quickly. The intended outcome is to boost sell-through rates by quickly eliminating underperforming items, improve visibility of high-performing SKUs at the store level, and cultivate a culture of fast, ongoing merchandising improvements. The slide underscores the importance of agility in retail operations, suggesting that static planning methods are insufficient in fast-changing environments. The core message is that a continuous, data-informed testing environment enables retailers to respond swiftly to local market dynamics, ultimately increasing sales efficiency and store performance. This approach transforms traditional SKU management into a more responsive and adaptive process, aligning merchandising more closely with real-time consumer demand. For potential customers, the slide offers a compelling case for adopting a more flexible, iterative SKU management system that leverages store-level insights to drive better sales outcomes. It signals a shift from rigid planning to a more fluid, responsive operational model that can keep pace with market shifts and customer preferences.
This PPT slide presents a framework for scaling Tanpin Kanri, a localized execution methodology, across multiple retail formats beyond just convenience stores. It emphasizes that the core principles of Tanpin Kanri—observe, hypothesize, act—are adaptable to various retail channels such as supermarkets, e-commerce, and specialty retail. The slide highlights that the cycle of observation and action can be tailored to different formats, which allows for responsiveness and inventory efficiency. Retailers are experimenting with elements like adjusting promotions, shelf stock, and bundles based on foot traffic and POS data in department stores, while behavioral data such as page views and click-throughs are used in e-commerce to support hypothesis-driven SKU exposure. For specialty retail, product recommendations and displays are customized to reflect neighborhood preferences.
Key requirements for scaling include flexible supply chains, modular inventory systems, frontline training for rapid decision-making, and feedback mechanisms to monitor micro-level performance. These are essential to ensure the principles can be executed consistently across formats and geographies. The slide underscores that with the right infrastructure and cultural shift, the item-level logic of Tanpin Kanri can accelerate response times and improve inventory management across diverse retail environments.
This approach offers a pragmatic way for retailers to extend proven local execution principles into broader formats, ultimately enabling faster adaptation to customer behavior and demand fluctuations. The focus on infrastructure and frontline empowerment suggests that success hinges on operational agility and real-time insights. For executives, this slide signals a scalable, principles-based methodology that can be customized for different retail channels, supporting a more responsive and efficient retail operation.
This PPT slide outlines the core principles that underpin Tanpin Kanri, a methodology driven by IBM, aimed at enhancing retail execution through adaptability and precise decision-making. The principles are designed to embed flexibility, data usage, and frontline ownership into daily retail operations. The 4 key principles include Daily Demand Hypothesis Formation, which emphasizes staff developing localized product hypotheses based on customer behaviors. Empowered Frontline Autonomy is about trusting store personnel to make merchandising and ordering decisions without headquarters intervention. Data Feedback Loops and POS Integration focus on utilizing POS data and handheld terminals to feed insights back into decision processes at the frontline. High-Frequency SKU Optimization involves teams continuously refining product mixes and volumes based on real-time sales data. These principles work together to create a retail system that is decentralized, data-responsive, and customer-focused. The slide suggests that their integration ensures the retail operation remains agile, scalable, and rooted in frontline realities. The highlighted note underscores that these principles are interconnected, forming a cohesive framework for retail excellence. The overall message is that adopting these core principles can significantly improve retail execution, making it more responsive to local conditions and customer needs. For potential buyers, this slide offers a clear view of how Tanpin Kanri’s principles can be operationalized to drive retail performance through a structured, data-driven approach. It also hints at the importance of frontline empowerment and continuous refinement, which are critical for sustaining retail agility at scale. The footer indicates this is part of a broader item-based management approach, emphasizing real-time insights and SKU optimization.
This PPT slide outlines the final step in a cyclical review process aimed at continuous improvement in item-based management, specifically within the Tanpin Kanri framework. It emphasizes the importance of reviewing outcomes to refine actions and strategies. The process is broken into 3 key components: Review, Review of Sales Outcome, and Refining the Approach.
The Review and Refine step involves evaluating sales data immediately after a sales period, with staff assessing if the product met expectations based on POS sales figures. This immediate feedback is crucial for quick adjustments. The review of sales outcomes includes analyzing customer responses and deviations from expected results. Customer responses reveal shifts in shopper behavior, dwell time, and purchase patterns, while deviation analysis helps identify reasons behind mismatches, such as placement, timing, or product issues.
Refining the approach involves fine-tuning order quantities and stock replenishment frequencies, adjusting layouts to better match observed demand, and establishing a loopback to observation. These steps ensure that insights gained from sales and customer feedback directly influence operational adjustments. The slide highlights that this review mechanism is ongoing, with a note indicating that continuous review keeps merchandising tightly aligned with actual consumer behavior.
The overarching message is that this cycle of review and refinement is essential for sustaining a responsive, data-driven management approach. It underscores the importance of iterative learning based on real-time sales and customer insights, which helps optimize inventory and merchandising strategies. The slide's structure and content suggest that this process is designed for managers seeking to embed continuous improvement into their operational routines, ensuring that actions are always aligned with market realities.
Overall, this slide presents a practical, repeatable framework for closing the loop on sales performance and customer response, fostering ongoing learning and operational agility.
This PPT slide compares 2 approaches to retail management: Category-Based Management and Item-Based Management. It highlights how centralized systems can create blind spots in retail operations by affecting the alignment between shelf presentation and shopper needs. The slide emphasizes that traditional category-based merchandising assumes uniform demand across regions and store formats, which often leads to inefficiencies. It explains that category-based models prioritize logistical efficiency, negotiated supplier contracts, and national promotions,, but tend to overlook local demand variations. This results in stores ending up with bloated inventories and low-turnover SKUs. Conversely, item-based management treats each product as a hypothesis, focusing on individual SKU performance, store-specific environments, and daily data updates. This approach aims to close the gap between what is on the shelf and what shoppers want, by enabling real-time, localized adjustments. The key differences are summarized across 4 dimensions: decision-making, time horizon, responsiveness, and goal orientation. Category-based decision-making is centralized and driven by procurement or merchandising HQ, with planning cycles aligned to monthly or seasonal schedules. Item-based decision-making is decentralized, driven by front-line insights, and involves daily or hourly adjustments. Responsiveness in category-based systems is slow, reacting to shifts in demand over longer periods, while item-based systems are designed to be real-time and highly responsive to local behavior. The ultimate goal of item-based management is to maximize relevance and customer satisfaction, contrasting with the scale and supplier alignment focus of category-based models. The slide suggests that shifting towards item-based management restores decision rights to where demand actually occurs, improving inventory efficiency and shopper engagement.
This framework is developed by a team of former McKinsey and Big 4 consultants. The presentation follows the headline-body-bumper slide format used by global consulting firms.
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