Supply Chain Visibility: Are you Running the Race End to End?
How Visible are the Links in your Supply Chain?
To keep up with their customers in today’s marketplace, retailers need supply chain visibility to look closer at their entire supply chains’ performance to succeed. To have happy customers in today’s marketplace requires retailers to be much more responsive to their customer’s demands.
Retailers must examine their supply chain end-to-end for issues that drive their business. Having the right inventory strategy is just the start. You need to be customer-centric in your execution, monitoring promotions and events and reacting to customers’ preferences that drive business. The right tools allow you to measure results and balance the tradeoffs between inventory, forecast accuracy, customer service, revenue, and profits.
Additionally, End-to-End systems support timely responses to operational issues such as stockouts, overstocking, or delayed deliveries, that affect customer service and logistics costs.
Today’s End to End supply chain systems carry these characteristics:
- Resiliency & Reliability: Changes in demand are identified and responded to without higher costs or service issues. Consistently deliver the right amount of product, at the appropriate location and time both at the store and at the DC level.
- Forward Looking: Systems that integrate trade promotion management and product allocation into demand forecasting and inventory replenishment decisions in order to minimize work and maximize the results.
- Speed of Response: Use today’s technology to alert the key people in your supply chain in real time to changes in demand or supply issues. Built in business analytics trigger messaging to planners, merchants, and suppliers. Via desktop alerts, e-mails, or a smartphone app the right people can be notified wherever they are working that day, allowing them to resolve issues before service problems happen that drive up your costs.
- Demand Sharing: Give you the ability to share promotional scorecards, KPI’s, and future demand projections with key stakeholders in your company and with your suppliers. Suppliers can use this information to improve your results: improved promotion support and better customer service. Sharing demand and order projections is a win-win: higher fill rates, lower lead times, and lower logistics and product costs.
Forward-looking retailers must invest in end-to-end systems that help them succeed in the marketplace. Supply chain solutions designed to utilize today’s technology can provide higher levels of execution and customer satisfaction than older, top-down legacy systems.
The improved execution translates into increased inventory productivity, higher on-shelf availability, and greater cash flow and gross margin. These new tools will allow your employees to proactively manage your business in a much more forward-looking way, which translates into better results.
Our iKIS supply chain solution is cloud-based, can be installed easily in under 90 days, and provides game-changing capabilities end-to-end.. Contact us for more information.
Copyright © Data Profits, Inc. 2014 All Rights Reserved.
Stuart graduated from Auburn University, with bachelor of science in business administration.
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