As an industry, global consumer products companies have historically underinvested in plants and manufacturing capabilities. In fact, a significant number of organizations may still be running their operations on equipment and processes that were last updated in the prior millennium. Under these circumstances, throughput can rarely keep pace with current needs. At the same time, many of these same companies have made one or more large acquisitions that slow the supply chain down even more: duplication and redundancy at the plant level; disparate operating and ERP systems that cloud visibility; and manual processes that consumed valuable resources.

Omnichannel retailing is here to stay, and retailers not using it successfully are losing sales and profits to those that do. In devising an omnichannel strategy, the natural starting point is the point of purchase "” brick-and-mortar stores and/or e-commerce sites for online and mobile shopping. But customer expectations don't stop when the sale is made. Order fulfillment is every bit as important to winning repeat business. Now more than ever, a well-developed supply chain strategy is vital to retailers' success.

Scarmor, a logistics subsidiary of the French hypermarket chain E.Leclerc, has installed a network of RFID readers that works without middleware at 35 dock doors within two warehouses. The company continues to roll out the technology that will be used to track pallets being moved from distribution centers to roughly 58 E.Leclerc retail sites throughout the French province of Brittany.