Clean supply side data improves in-store customer experience

Recently I have been reading (a bit more than I want) about technologies around Demand Driven Supply Chains (DDSC). Just today, I came across an interesting article- Is your retail supply chain working at full efficiency? – on the same via a Tweet from ChainStoreAge. As you may have guessed, according to the author Kevin Stadler the solution is to invest in a demand forecasting and automated order management solution.

I agree with Kevin that a DDSC can [greatly] improve customer experience and financial performance of retailers, but I take a different approach to building a DDSC.

Building a demand forecasting solution is an onerous undertaking given the technological complexity in collecting clean demand side data. For a forecasting solution demand side data has to come from numerous sources. These sources, according to Microsoft & AMR, include POS scan data, store & DC inventories, planograms, sore clusters, retail item hierarchies, events, sales info, promotions, syndicated data etc. In other words getting clean demand side data is likely a technology nightmare!

My suggestion, based on numerous supply chain case studies, is to build a DDSC from the supply side. We all agree that retailers are all interested in providing superior in-store customer service and increasing top & bottom line. This is possible if shelves are stocked with products customers want each time they walk in the store, just as Kevin mentioned in his writeup. I posit that it is far efficient to integrate with suppliers and get clean and harmonized supply side data to make strategic and operational retail decisions to reduce lead times, stock-out frequencies, and ultimately to improve in-store experience.

More on this in future posts.

Re-freshing retweet from RT to…..

Usually I tweet about retail supply chain and of course other stuff. But I use Seesmic desktop and not Twitter on the web.

But today I was on Twitter.com and was greeted with a message that my a/c like few others is included in a beta group.

Retweets will now appear as an icon shown in the illustration here.

I am not sure if changing RT with this new icon is a good idea. But a test would be the best way to find out. My guess, Twitter won’t roll this out of beta.
What do you think?

Insights from using (Google’s) advanced segmentation tool

I was talking to someone new in online marketing and we were discussing segmenting visitor data.

Take the case of source of visitors to QLogitek’s website for a month. The top illustration indicates that over close to 82% of visitors are people who know us and only 12% find us! Cursory conclusion may be – we have to do more on SEM and SEO.

Now, take the bottom illustration. This shows the source of all visitors who viewed at least 2 pages on our supply chain integration solutions website (aka QLogitek.com). By segmenting the visitor data we can see that about 37% of visitors who come to QLogitek find us via search engines.

Using Avinash Kaushik’s suggestion let us ask so what? The answer to this coming next.