Solutions

Collaboration with Retailers

Collaboration is the next great leap in supply chain performance. With customer/supplier collaboration, you can deliver higher order fill rates that yield increased sales while maintaining lower inventory. The key is communicating with retailers over the Internet. Go online to learn about their promotion plans and new store openings far enough in advance to plan production and inventory to meet their needs cost-effectively.

Most of the larger key retail accounts plan to engage in collaborative planning, forecasting, and replenishment (CPFR) based on guidelines from the Voluntary Inter-industry Standards Committee (VICS). Efficient collaborative service will bring you superior performance-and the opportunity to increase your market share. And because most collaborative planning and CPFR tasks are business intelligence (BI) functions, they can be run on an automated exception/alert basis using a configured BI tool with real-time portal capabilities.

Enabling Collaborative Processes

Collaborative planning allows you to use BI to team up with accounts over the Internet. After laying the groundwork, you typically:

Then, as your shipments are planned and delivered, systems automatically compare planned to actual and alert managers to variances. The entire process is outlined in an industry-wide standard available at vics.org.

Collaborate to Reduce Inventories

Collaborative planning lets you have items in stock with less inventory, particularly for key accounts. By considering key accounts' planned orders, you can increase the accuracy of your overall forecast. By using the collaboratively developed planned orders to automatically plan production and procurement, you can provide key accounts with superior fill rates, provide them with less end-of-month and end-of-quarter overtime operations, and help reduce total cost.

Manage via Real-Time Alerts

BI for collaborative planning creates real-time or near real-time alerts so that your managers can avoid pouring over mountains of reports. With these real-time capabilities, they can learn about emerging problems as they occur-rather than merely hearing about issues after it's too late to do anything.

Retailers Involved in CPFR

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