The first time I stood in a supermarket back room at closing time, I watched a manager fill two crates with food that was perfectly good that morning. He was not careless. He was the opposite: he had been doing this for eleven years, he knew his customers by name, and he still could not tell you which of his four hundred products were worth the space they took up.
Nobody had ever given him the numbers in a form he could act on. He had a report that ran to a thousand rows, a wholesaler who wanted him to buy more, and a Sunday afternoon he spent counting stock instead of being at home.
Zero waste is not a constraint. It is what a well-run store looks like.
That is the whole idea behind Panlytics. Not a dashboard to admire. A short list of decisions: order this many, move this reorder point, stop carrying this. Made from the store's own numbers, in language a person can act on before the next delivery.
And there is a version of retail analytics I want no part of, the kind that finds its margin by charging more for less, or by pushing the things with the best kickback to the front. We only ever recommend stocking what people already want, in the amount they actually buy it. That is the rare case where everybody genuinely wins: the customer finds their thing, the staff stop babysitting stock that never sells, the owner keeps more of what they earn, and nothing goes in the bin.
If that sounds obvious, good. It should have been ordinary a long time ago.
Aayan Asif, founder