The Evasiveness of Inventory - Whether you have it or not you still Loose Sales

Rishi is a market leader in the men’s fashion market in India. It designs, produces and sells several top brands in a chain of more than 500 stores it owns, plus thousands of stores of other retailers. It enjoys a high market position and maintains its leadership for many years now. Still, in spite of the company’s success in keeping its leading position and delivering top line growth year on year (slightly above the market rate of growth) the company has not been successful in more than 20 years to deliver meaningful profits (it mostly makes a small loss, and occasionally a small profit). A management decision to focus on supply chain for achieving business performance improvement lead to the exposure of a few exceptional opportunities that through a few simple changes in their IT system and operational procedures resulted in a nice growth in sales and mainly a dramatic improvement in profitability and consumer satisfaction.

The Unavoidable Transformation of Supply Chain Management

The business world is experiencing volatility in levels it never used to - Cycles of economic growth, crisis and recovery are more frequent, unpredictable and ever more influential. This, together with the effects of globalization and natural catastrophes (such as in Japan and Thailand) as well as man-made ones sharply enhances the volatility experienced.  

Even this is enough to sound overwhelming, but in order to complete one mustn’t omit, in parallel there are a few more revolutions worth mentioning happening. They happen in different locations at different paces and at different times, but it is clear that they are here and that they are without doubt expanding everywhere. The Consumer Revolution- Today’s consumers are more technologically advanced, informed and knowledgeable, more connected to a wider community of consumers, more demanding and have higher awareness to well-being, health and sustainability. The Information Revolution- Today information is generated in rates never experienced before (recent studies estimate that every few minutes the amount of information generated is equal to the whole of the information generated since the beginning of the universe). And finally The Regulatory Revolution – Social trends, urbanization, care for the planet and quality of life leads to increase regulatory intervention in areas it never took part of before.

In-light of these realities, towards the end of 2012 a few surveys were conducted to evaluate how they affect supply chain management. This article brings the key findings of these surveys done by PwC, SCM World, Bloomberg Business week Research Services and CSC that combined surveyed thousands of managers in hundreds of organizations representing different markets, multiple industries and a variety of business realities.

Welcome Supply-Chain Practitioners

Supply-Chains are key enablers for realizing business strategies, satisfying customers, delivering value to stakeholders and gaining competitive edge. At the same time they are complex, involve many companies in various disciplines and are mostly beyond the immediate control areas thus optimizing their performance, through effective network synchronization is a major challenge in many fronts. And, this is exactly why we are so excited about them.

This blog intention is to be a stage for sharing knowledge, experience and tools among supply-chain practitioners as a small contribution to the global effort of creating lean, agile and sustainable synchronized demand networks. 

We hope you enjoy it and invite you to take active role in shaping it by providing your feedback and thoughts.