The Trading Partner Alliance, an industry affairs leadership group formed by the Grocery Manufacturers association and Food Marketing Institute, has released two new tools to help manufacturers reduce out-of-stock levels.

According to the alliance, out-of-stocks in the industry remain at an average of 8 percent. To address this availability problem, the taskforce has released the Best Practices Solutions to Address On Shelf Availability (OSA) Guide and On Shelf Availability Root Causes Ishikawa Diagram. The best practices guide addresses root causes—and potential solutions—of challenges across five retail functional domains: store execution, ordering and execution, forecasting, manufacturing and category management and merchandising. It also identifies process owners to deal with these product availability issues throughout the supply chain. The root causes diagram highlights the leading causes of failures across these areas and is tailored for use across the supply chain.

“These tools are critical to helping industry reach the goal of 98 percent on shelf availability,” says Daniel Triot, senior director of the alliance. “All trading partners must be firmly engaged and implementing best practices most applicable to each trading partner relationship or category and measuring the impact.”

The Best Practices Solutions to Address On Shelf Availability Guide can be accessed here.

The On Shelf Availability Root Causes Ishikawa Diagram can be accessed here.