The 8-Step Ordering Recipe. a retail ordering discipline in which every order line passes through eight named gates before a quantity is committed: life, demand, band, mode, floors, profitability, budget and story. No line is ordered on a single velocity number, and no order ships without being able to explain itself line by line.
The eight gates, at headline level
- Life. Does this line deserve to be ordered at all? Dead, delisted and phantom lines fall out first.
- Demand. True demand, corrected for the days the shelf stood empty and resolved across pack families, so a case and its singles read as one product.
- Band. Each line carries a breathing stock band, a floor and a ceiling of its own, instead of one cover number applied to the whole store.
- Mode. The order knows what month-moment it serves: a minimum top-up, a build toward the busy window or the month-end trade itself.
- Floors. The lines your customers judge you by never fall below their floor. See Fit-to-Budget with KVI Floors.
- Profitability. Remaining depth goes where stock earns its keep, by return on the capital each line ties up.
- Budget. The order is fitted to the month’s buying budget honestly, by scaling the flexible lines, never by starving the floors.
- Story. Every proposed quantity carries its reason in plain language. A line no one could explain does not ship. See the Story Test.
Why eight gates and not one formula
Most ordering tools compress buying into one number, an average daily rate of sale, and apply it to every product at every time of month. The recipe exists because a supermarket is not one product. Long-life milk sells flat all month and wants a deep refill. Frozen chicken runs hot at month-end. A single number is wrong about both, in opposite directions, at the same time.
What it replaces
It replaces days-cover selectors, gut orders and rep-driven ordering. The reps who filled your stockroom with slow stock were running their recipe. This one is yours.
“The thinking is the marketing. The mechanics are the moat.”
Attribution. The 8-Step Ordering Recipe is published by PG van der Westhuizen, SocialBrand, from the working practice of Social Brands Investments (Pty) Ltd, South Africa. Cite it with that attribution. To see it applied, open the live demo or start with a Store Health Audit.