Omnichannel offers to consumers a "continuous" shopping experience during which they can move freely through physical, online, telephone, and paper environments to meet all their shopping needs. A key factor for omnichannel success is unlimited access to the inventory of all channels: from the store to the website, to the App etc.
In order to ensure a unified experience for customers, retailers need to be able to strike the right balance between providing superior customer service while doing so at the lowest possible cost. For this reason, a single vision of the shared inventory is a must: if the company had adopted a single vision of the shared inventory, the product could be allocated by the distribution centre for the delivery of the store, thus obtaining fewer missed sales, faster turnover and higher margins.
Another point of attention for an omnichannel environment is return management. Returns are considered the hidden side of e - commerce and sales catalog. Retailers suffer significant reverse logistics cost and other additional products costs due to returns. TIA help Retailers to predict returns and minimize them wherever possible and to reposition the returned goods across their inventory.
A robust improved S&OP process with integrated supply and demand planning software can make the forecasting and planning process much more manageable. While adoption of the S&OP process has increased among manufacturers, the adoption rate among retailers is still in its in itial stages. In these days, where multichannel shopping requires a higher level of attention and where growth is expected to be increasing, retailers would be well served to consider the implementation of formal S&OP processes and technologies to remain c ompetitive with large web marketplace.
S&OP is a mid - range tactical process designed to align supply and demand. Among the first steps for a successful S&OP process is the creation of "a basic forecast and approximate supply and demand plans", which are "a ggregated, summarized and translated" to identify the imbalances between supply and demand to ensure a sufficient supply to satisfy demand (JBF articles in the 2004 - 2005 autumn, winter and spring editions, Larry Lapide). In an omnichannel environment, the alignment of supply and demand becomes difficult if we consider the multiple channels that must be foreseen , the potential hundreds of inventory positions from which such sales could be made and the high rate of returns.
TIA can help you to manage all of this! Get in touch with our consultants to find out how!
