1. @ the store
1.1. Managrs walk around and talk to sales people to determine what is selling and what is not - canvasing the store is the only way to learn about the stock levels
1.2. Managers learned about the garments available by consulting a handheld computer that was linked each night to La Coruna
1.3. less than 24 hours before "the order" was due each store received "the offer" - which included new clothing available to the store and sock orders they could replenish with
1.3.1. to fill the order the store manager divided it into segments, gave it to different people who would walk around with their handhelds and fill out the order form based on what they saw around the store in terms of stock - manager would review and send to La Coruna
2. IT applications
2.1. internally developed applications were used to prepare the offer and distribute it to the store as well as received the orders from the stores
2.2. another application compared the stock available to the demand from the orders and highlighter discreptancies which commercials would need to look at
2.3. another application kept track of theoretical inventory at each store - the stores transmitted their sales at the end of the day and this updated the theoretical invemtory
3. @ La Coruna
3.1. Order is received by a strict deadline
3.2. A group of commercials match up the supply available in the DCs with the demand of the stores in the order forms
3.2.1. if supply matched demand then no decision needed to be made- order was filled
3.2.2. if supply was less than demand then the commercials would make the decision of where the limited supply would go (which store)- this was based on where the garment was selling faster (sales numbers) and whether stores had been shortchanged in the past
3.2.3. these commercials also worked closely with product managers to determine future production for each SKU based on demand and sales numbers
3.2.4. these commercials would also ship items that were not requested by the store - typically these would be items that ZARA wanted to assess demand of