In the supply chain and sourcing domains, companies are changing the way they source, produce and distribute goods or services to their customers, in search of reduced costs and greater efficiency.
Smarter consumers want retailers to listen to them, know them and
empower them - at the same time that these consumers are
becoming more difficult to know.
Daymon Worldwide, a provider of brand-building and sourcing services for retail, has formed a new unit dedicated to transportation management and logistics support for retailers and suppliers.
Rizwan Asim, head of procurement and supply chain with SSC Al-Suwaidi Holding Co., discusses how integrated demand planning is helping Middle Eastern retailers to cope with a market boom.
Camstar Systems Inc. has released the NPI (New Product Introduction) Accelerator for manufacturers. The tool is intended to help users design, test and speed up the NPI process.
This report will provide retailers with the necessary insights into what steps they must take to satisfy their customers, thereby increasing customer loyalty as well as the lifetime value of customers.
There are two major challenges that companies face today in forecasting, says Bob Leonard, vice president of sales with Forecast Pro. One is the push to drive down to more detail, including smaller time buckets. The other is the need to treat forecasting as an analytical task, instead of just clerical work.
The demand for vendor-managed inventory programs in warehouses behaves "as a pendulum swinging back and forth between supplier and retailer," says John Mayer, vice president of sales with Park City Group. Over the last six to 12 months, he says, it has swung back in the direction of favoring VMI. Mayer has seen particular interest in the technique in the grocery industry.
Downstream demand signals have been available in the retail world for some time now, but it has taken a while for suppliers to take full advantage of them. Mark Kremblewski, global business expert in demand planning with Procter & Gamble, likens the situation to the mining industry, which trades in deposits of both high- and low-grade ore. The latter type is more plentiful, but it's the first that offers the biggest payback from a better use of demand data in unpredictable situations.
While both the U.S. and Canadian governments have taken significant steps to facilitate the flow of goods, there are regulatory protocols that must be complied with for a U.S. business to successfully ship goods to Canada.