Multi Channel Fulfilment for Retailers

I recently had cause to look at this solution from the IVIS Group.

Smart retailers now understand that gaining the potential benefits of a multichannel strategy - increased market share, increased sales, improved customer equity and reduced costs - takes a lot more than simply expanding the number of channels used to reach customers.

Giving your customers the consistent and rich buying experience they demand means ensuring that your brand, products, promotions and pricing are presented in a coherent way to all customers, whatever channel or mix of

channels they choose to buy from.

Setting up and operating a multi-channel environment opens up huge opportunities but also brings many challenges, principally the need for well managed, consistent and rich information across all channels.

The solution as presented in the IVIS whitepaper assists in:

• Aligning information across channels to ensure a consistent customer experience
• Integrating information - product, price, descriptions, specifications, availability and images - across online and offline channels to increase customer satisfaction
• Delivering cross-channel category management, merchandising and promotions
• Enabling cross-selling and up-selling by optimising the purchasing process from research to browsing and point-of-sale
• Facilitating rapid implementation of new channels, products, partners and processes
• Enabling dynamic promotion of high margin and overstock products while demoting out of stock and uncompetitive products

Multi channel Fulfilment Planning and Forecasting

The objective of Planning and Forecasting is to drive growth and profitability across the business by accurately predicting key performance metrics by channel and managing inventory in line with demand as it changes.

This analysis has shown that the Direct channels of Catalog and Web have significant differences in behaviors, structures and metrics, compared to the Store channel.

To optimize the planning process it is therefore critical to take account of these unique characteristics and treat each channel as distinct selling vehicles to proactively drive demand. An organization also needs cross-channel visibility to trends and the impact of changes in each individual channel on the ability to execute the overall strategic goals. However, trying to plan all channels as if they were the same will only result in a suboptimal plan and lost opportunities.

It is helpful to think about multi-channel planning in a similar way to how a customer shops. The customer expects the overall brand experience to be consistent across Web, Catalog and Store, but each selling vehicle represents a different experience for the shopper in terms of promotional offers, the amount of product information available, merchandise presentation and convenience.

These differences impact the way these channels need to be planned. Trying to support catalog planning or web planning with a store-focused planning process or solution will ultimately compromise customer service and erode profit margins.

Online shopping - The Australian Perspective

Recent articles published in The Age newspaper are giving us a clearer picture of the Australian online market place.

There's a 20 per cent annual increase in the number of people shopping online. The online market is current;y estimated to turnover A$9.5B

Online retailing is here, growing fast and not about to be curtailed.

Read the full article http://www.theage.com.au/business/finally--a-clearer-picture-of-online-shopping-20110729-1i2yl.html#ixzz1TW4vRTcD

The rise & rise of Private Label Retailing

The Global Private Label Mgmt (PLM) trend (as seen in the USA , UK) is well and truly on the rise in Australian Retail. Most big retailers are actively growing their stable of private label products.

Private label used to be less than 5% of revenue but today the targets are up as high as 40+%.

This makes sense if you're in the FMCG sector , pharma sector or any retail arena that has high and competitive volume sales.

But we should also be aware that PLM can deliver;

■ Greater product innovation and brand differentiation

■ Accelerated sales and reduce market lead times

■ Streamlined supply chain working practices

■ Collaborative category management

■ Complete and validated product due diligence

■ One truth database for providing consumer facing information

■ Compliance to legal, ethical, environmental and safety regulations

■ Increased sales volume and reduced time to market

■ Elimination of duplication and waste

■ Control of brand integrity

■ Create a collaborative product development environment for retail colleagues;

■ Collaborate with suppliers and 3rd parties critical to your supply chain, e.g. laboratories or auditors, around one dataset and one lifecycle process;

■ Rapidly increase private label volume without increasing costs;

If you'd like to know more then please contact me or click on the link above..

Australian Retail: Cost reduction solutions

The current lack of retail consumer confidence ( and spend) is hitting retailers hard.

Revenues are down , foot traffic thru stores is down.

The only growth area seems to be Internet sales. Many retailers are looking at cost reduction strategies in order to maintain their margins. This makes good sense as it can deliver immediate savings and also provide a platform for long term process improvements.

In my travels across Aust i see significant interest in eSourcing initiatives being used to lower the cost of goods sold. A strong dollar and strong global trade means that sourcing from Asia and Eastern Europe has never been better value.

All retailers looking for better sourcing for their products should in my opinion look at SaaS based esourcing as a winning solution in these hard times.