Supply Chain Report: A Practical Approach to Digitization
Q: To become more customer relationship-centric, grocery retailers are embracing new technologies. How can new applications help grocery associates focus on serving customers?
Consumers are exponentially savvier and more demanding than ever before. Knowing your individual customers and catering to their needs is fast becoming the holy grail for all retailers, including grocery. With buying trends increasingly impacted by social media influencers, well- ness trends, ethical and environmental concerns, and the unexpected, businesses need the ability to respond quickly and proactively.
Spending 95%of your time perfecting a plan in order to get 5% better at fulfillment is a fool’s errand if you aren’t able to build a nimble organization. So if you want to create a customer-first strategy, you have to enhance your organization with technology that allows your team to quickly adapt to buying trends and consumer demand changes. Move quickly and pivot.
Q: How does integrating store-level data from across banners and brands into all enterprise systems increase profitability and make operations more seamless?
Data integration can help the retailer focus on fast-moving, profitable product assortments to meet variable consumer demand. But the full value of integration can only be truly realized when data patterns are shared outside of the enterprise and back to the brands and their manufacturers.
Brands, including private labels, have a vested interest in improving product life cycles, reducing SKU proliferation and guaranteeing on-shelf availability. In order to do this, companies need to connect across their network and better orchestrate data and action to get ahead of — or better yet prevent — supply chain fires. By integrating multi-enterprise data and enabling joint collaboration, brands can see the interdependencies across their global networks and safely reduce lead times or inventory, while still delivering on time and in full.
Q: How can retailers improve usability, trainability, and reduce errors when implementing user interfaces?
There’s a lot of incredible technology that simply isn’t usable. Most software vendors view the world of retailers and manufacturers as a theoretical science project rather than a real-world problem fraught with challenges that go far beyond the numbers.
When implementing new software, it’s vital to empower your boots-on-the-ground employees by thinking about improving process, rather than technology for technology’s sake. Ideally the design of the software should drive that process, be intuitive, and be led by a mobile-centric app. If you need an operations research degree to operate the platform, you’re going to waste a lot of resources training your employees and not see a return on investment.
Q: How can artificial intelligence technologies help grocers improve their workforce?
From POS and ERP systems to supply chain management software, much of the data needed to make quick, profitable decisions are never available in one place. Most enterprises still export data from multiple systems, load them into a giant spreadsheet and run highly complex models – in a batch – to correlate information and make high-impact decisions. Usually this is done in some head office, far away in time and distance from the actual problem.
When it comes to retail and the product economy in general, the power of AI is realized by the ability to aggregate, normalize, and validate all the necessary data across multiple ecosystems into a pre-built data model so that big decisions can happen in hours rather than weeks. AI will give the necessary leverage for all parties and partners, from individual stores up to the corporate level, to be more farsighted and become more strategic. This is the power of AI: augmenting human capabilities by doing the heavy lifting and number crunching. Empower employees close to your customer.
Elementum is the software-as-a-service company behind the first cloud-native supply chain orchestra on platform. In today’s world, instant gratification trumps brand loyalty. To survive, brands must connect across their extended ecosystem so they can operate in real-time and deliver at the speed of customer demand. By digitally mapping the $25 trillion product economy, Elementum’s platform sheds light on the flow of goods around the world and facilitates cross-ecosystem execution to ensure that products are available at the right time, place, quantity and cost.
Download the full "Supply Chain Report 2018" below.