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.

Canadian firms are adopting cloud computing faster than rest of the world !

Being at QLogitek I was not surprised by IT World Canada report indicating that large Canadian enterprises are more aware and more likely users of cloud computing compared to their global counterparts. This study was conducted by “Kelton Research.” If you were familiar with QLogitek’s client list (see a short selection of clients) using SaaS EDI and SaaS supply chain management solutions even you would not be surprised.

The study surveyed 502 C-level executives and IT and business decision-makers from mostly large enterprise organizations in 17 countries including the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany and Singapore.

It showed that more than 67 per cent of Canadian organizations reported they are currently using a combination of cloud computing and internally owned IT systems, compared to only one-third of companies worldwide.

Nearly two in three IT executives worldwide (65 per cent) and four of five in Canada (80 per cent) believe cloud computing reduces upfront costs.

QLogitek’s clients in retail and CPG markets have been using software-as-a-service (SaaS) and Integration-as-a-service (IaaS) both of which are subsets of cloud computing for over 8 years.

Alternative perspective discussion on SaaS

Madison Laird a fellow denizen of Twitterverse initiated an interesting conversation few days ago. He tweeted “I’m ranting about the drawbacks to SaaS. I love being a contrarian. Anyone want to brawl about it?” and I, like others, tweeted back saying yes SaaS has drawbacks, but its benefits to small and medium size business outweigh the drawabacks.

Madison did the appropriate thing and took the conversation to his new blog with the post titled Alternative Perspectives on SaaS. By the way Madison, I applaud you for doing so. It demonstrates your good social-media acumen and gives us more space (>140 characters) to share our thoughts.

I look forward to understanding your perspective better. I did post a comment, that I will repost here next and respond to your questions better.