In today’s changing market dynamics, the retail business is getting more competitive by the day. Increasing competition by online marketplaces, along with evolving consumer expectations and shopping patterns are making the category management decisions more complex. As customers’ options increase, so do their expectations. Assortment planning decisions made by these teams need to be more dynamic and localized as manual analysis based on broad assumptions and averages do not suffice anymore. Here are the vital capabilities for surviving in the new world of retail.
U.S. companies that conduct significant volumes of cross-border manufacturing and trade with Mexico have had to contend with a variety of challenges since 2019, including tariff threats, the impact of COVID-19 on the supply chain and the subsequent challenges of restarting idled manufacturing, and the forthcoming implementation of the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).
When I started my career the term “supply chain” was just emerging. Most professionals I interacted with during my early days in this industry were still referring to “materials management” and “procurement” when they spoke of what we call “supply chain” today. We also had a role called a “master planner” who was typically an […]
Consumer and enterprise software has gone through a significant evolution over the last five years. Consumers have reached a point where software as a service (SaaS) has become an imperceptible norm. One might assume designing a SaaS-based WMS is as simple as taking a legacy WMS, deploying it in a public cloud, wrapping it up with managed services, and re-branding the offering as SaaS WMS. But to truly understand the benefits of being a cloud-native WMS, we have to look a little deeper. There are four key considerations enterprises need to evaluate when selecting a cloud WMS solution.
As more of the economy comes back online, distribution-oriented companies find their business in one of the following situations: volumes are up but costs have risen faster or, volumes are down considerably, and they don’t appear to be coming back any time soon. In both cases, the objective is to right-size distribution operations to drive down costs and dramatically improve productivity. Now is the time for distribution companies to look hard at their current fleet strategies, tactics and use of technology to make a step change in operational performance. Here are two ways fleet operators can make a difference.
The rug has been pulled out from beneath us. Doing things the same way we’ve always done them will no longer serve us, so we can’t simply put it back in its place. In fact, the definition of pulling the rug out from underneath someone is that doing so causes their plans to fail, because […]
One thing that I find interesting in the AI movement is the creative use of data and algorithms to solve old problems in a new way or to solve new problems. My colleague, Vikram Srinivasan talked about one such new problem in a previous blog post: AI is Changing Everything We Thought About Forecasting Demand. […]