Modern supply chains help retailers please fickle customer

27 Sep '12

7 min read

Mr Black explains, “A holistic view of inventory is necessary for any organisation wishing to compete in a multi-channel environment. When customers shop online they expect to see the entire network’s inventory and when in a retail store, customers expect a sales associate to have visibility of stock positions across the business.

“If a high street customer finds that an item is out of stock in-store, a sales associate needs to locate it somewhere in the supply chain and arrange for it to reach the customer. This will involve not only locating it, but then shipping the product to the customer’s home, or to a convenient store for pick-up. However, as expectations continue to rise, the timeframe for doing this is coming down from days to hours”.

On the challenge to achieving inventory visibility, he says, “This notion of ‘seeing more’ can seem like a big challenge. All too often data resides in a number of different silos across the business or retained within individual channels. The online channel looks at the inventory that is in the distribution centre for the web.

The stores may be able to see across to other stores but they may not see inventory held for the web and may not be able to see items in transit or available for sale from a ‘drop ship’ vendor. Most retailers cannot afford to rip-and-replace their existing inventory management systems, however, it can be avoided if information from each area can be streamed to a consolidated system that pulls all the data together and then, most importantly, connects it back to the orders.

Having a single place to manage all transactions makes ‘selling more’ possible. The value is in infusing this intelligence into the customer touch points – the websites, the call centres, and the in-store staff. For organisations in the multi-channel arena, the desire to ‘see more’ is less about reducing inventory and more about ‘selling more’. The potential to realise additional sales – scooping up the sales that may have once slipped away – is a strong motivating force in a harsh retail environment.

“Those that see the opportunity, and act on it, will profit from it. But more than this, retailers in the fashion industry have to deliver and sell products within the confines of a short season. Visibility helps to sell more items at full price within that window because they can fulfil orders that might otherwise slip when customers can’t get their items immediately”, he wound up this long and interesting interview by saying.

In a market where speed is key, customers can be here today, gone tomorrow. Fashion retailers have a small window of opportunity to put customers and products together and to do this they must have control over their supply chains.

Fibre2fashion News Desk - India

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