Retail industry is extremely competitive and it's value chain is always in a state of continuous flux with unpredictable demand and supply. As a result, retail chains are increasingly asking their partners to assume a greater role in product planning, new product launches, stocking level, store selection, and promotions. This essentially is shifting the responsibility of ensuring that the retail stores have the right products, in the right place, at the right time on to the supplier.
Suppliers to major retailers like Wal-Mart are facing intense pressure to collaboratively plan, forecast, and execute (PFE) to drive sales and reduce costs in a world where most of the information is semi-structured and distributed within their extended supply chain. This trend is forcing companies to do the tasks manually using excel and email, which turns out to be time consuming and error prone. Most of these collaborative planning decisions involve high volume; low margin products requiring significant investments (e.g. trade and consumer promotions, inventory, capital investments or volume commitments) the financial and business risk to the vendors are very high. In addition, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is poised to spark a global revolution - in supply chain visibility and management.
Extenprise RetailDriver™ is the first collaborative demand and supply chain PFE solution for companies who supplies goods and products to major retailers like Wal-Mart. The solution offerings helps suppliers improve the way they manage their cross-enterprise processes and tracking movement of goods in manufacturing plants, warehouses, distribution centers, retail store backrooms and finally the shelves in retail outlets. It also helps suppliers to optimize their business processes to take advantage of real-time supply chain visibility, revamp the current enterprise applications, and integrate existing systems with the RFID technology. Finally, it provides comprehensive capabilities that enable trading networks to collaborate either internally or externally and create and maintain joint business plans, monitor the execution of those plans, and measure their success.
RETAIL SUPPLY CHAIN CHALLENGES
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Making smarter business decisions using Retailer's Point-of-Sales (POS) Data: Efficient, cost-effective management of point-of-sale (POS) data is an increasingly critical requirement for maintaining competitive advantage. Manufacturers need to tackle the challenges of working with the huge retail data on a daily basis to reduce inventory-carrying costs and gain critical insight into customer buying patters and behavior. Analysts spend far too much time, everyday, pushing data around a spreadsheet for preparing analysis rather than analyzing the data.
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Planning for the "right" levels of in-store inventory: With the industry-wide average forecast accuracy at 50 percent, the risk of write-offs and markdowns due to excess and obsolete inventory is high. Poor forecast accuracy also leads to low order-fill rates, which negatively impact customer service level metrics and result in lost sales. Frequent retailer and manufacturer promotions introduce a high degree of variability into the supply chain and are one of the most frequent sources of supply and demand misalignment. With indeterminate demand profiles of new products, risk of out-of-stock and excess inventory situations is even higher than for established products during its launch.
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Offshore manufacturing partners extending supply chain: Outsourcing of services, materials and manufacturing has grown dramatically as companies have incorporated leaner operating models. Collaborative supply chain planning is a key component to ensure the right levels of inventory and capacities meet customer demand.
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Getting the financial benefits from the RFID mandate: Addition of a RFID (Radio frequency identification) layer would need integration with the existing legacy systems of the manufacturers. RFID systems would generate huge amount of data, picking up the right data, controlling and manipulating that information received from these systems, then using it within the enterprise and sharing it with the trading partners, is difficult and challenging. Efficient RFID applications will increase visibility throughout global supply chains and help trace shipments, combat the introduction of counterfeit products and prevent retailer out-of-stocks.
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Integration into disparate systems: In today's complex, multi-platform enterprise, unifying systems management under a common infrastructure is a significant force driving many business decisions. IT departments of all organizations are facing the challenge to manage all disparate resources in the most economical, secure, and efficient manner possible.
Extenprise RetailDriver™ is a solution with a complete suite of four fully integrated modules:
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RetailDriver™ Overview
