Transforming Inventory Forecasting with a Unified Power Platform Solution

A leading global thrift retailer faced growing pains as it scaled operations across hundreds of stores, warehouses, and nonprofit networks in North America and Australia. Despite its strong commitment to sustainability and reuse, its inventory planning relied heavily on fragmented Excel tools and manual workflows. These outdated methods resulted in misaligned deliveries, inefficiencies, and data silos that hindered progress. Partnering with RedCloud Consulting, the retailer replaced its patchwork of spreadsheets with a modern, connected Power Platform solution—bringing real-time collaboration, accurate forecasting, and enterprise-wide visibility to life.

Client Situation

This global thrift retailer, known for reselling secondhand goods through a network of nonprofit partners and store brands across the U.S., Canada, and Australia, found itself at a crossroads. Its mission to drive sustainability through reuse was being hindered by critical challenges in forecasting inventory and coordinating operations across a vast ecosystem.

Legacy forecasting tools—Excel-based templates like the Inventory Management Tool (IMT), Dedicated Delivery Plan (DDP), and Stock on Hand Forecaster (SOH) were siloed, lacked data integrity, and couldn’t support real-time collaboration. These manual processes made it nearly impossible to keep inflows and outflows in sync with processing capabilities and store-level demand.

Complicating matters, a wide range of stakeholders, including store managers, supply chain teams, logistics coordinators, and nonprofit delivery partners, were working off disconnected data sources. To streamline operations and elevate forecasting accuracy, the retailer turned to RedCloud Consulting for a scalable, enterprise-ready solution.

Our Approach

RedCloud partnered closely with internal teams across sourcing, store support, IT, and operations to design a cohesive, role-based forecasting platform using Microsoft Power Platform. At its core: a trio of seamlessly integrated Power Apps.

• Inventory Management Tool (IMT): This tool empowers leadership and sourcing teams to forecast demand and plan inventory needs across the organization.

• Dedicated Delivery Plan (DDP): This plan converts high-level forecasts into detailed weekly delivery schedules, broken down by store, vendor, and delivery type.

• Stock on Hand (SOH): Enables store managers to monitor, manage, and fine-tune daily inventory levels, ensuring alignment with forecasted targets.

Each app was designed to “talk” to the others, automatically populating values and syncing data to minimize manual work. Users benefit from intelligent defaults, autofill logic (like Year-over-Year and multi-week averaging), and the ability to customize forecasts with just a few clicks.

To foster adoption, a central Home App was developed, providing access to relevant tools tailored to each user’s role. A Feedback App also encouraged continuous improvement by capturing user input during development.

The solution’s standout feature? Deep integration with the organization’s internal Location Management system. The platform dynamically adjusts access and visibility by syncing with real-time employee and store assignments. That means a district manager sees only their stores, and a store manager sees just their own; no manual setup is needed.

Power Platform Dataflows further enhanced the system by synchronizing key data, such as inventory transfers and stock levels, from the company’s Snowflake environment into Dataverse, ensuring everything remains current and accurate.

The solution is fully multilingual, offering English, French, and Spanish based on device settings or user preferences to support global teams.

Impact

The new Inventory Forecasting Solution (IFS) has transformed operations from disjointed spreadsheets into a smart, centralized platform that connects sourcing, store leadership, and supply chain management.

With accurate, real-time data and collaborative forecasting, teams can now align product flow with store capacity, improve turnaround time, and reduce overstock or understock issues. Field leaders have a clear view of what’s coming and when, improving execution and communication across the board.

Automated logic, role-based access, and smart defaults eliminate repetitive manual entry, saving valuable time each week. Additionally, thanks to its flexible and scalable architecture, the platform is well-equipped to evolve as business needs change.

Most importantly, this solution strengthens the retailer’s sustainability mission by ensuring the right product reaches the right location at the right time, maximizing reuse and reducing waste across its global network.