Striving for Excellence in the Supply Chain

In the aftermath of the extraordinary couple of years, we have had, one thing is certain; supply chain is now getting a seat at the table. The focus we have had the past couple of years allows us to contribute and participate in the conversations about profitability and strategy for the business, instead of being just another support function for the revenue-driving stakeholders.

This has now opened a heap of opportunities for us to showcase what we do and what we can bring to the table, that impacts the bottom line. Cash flow is king, so by becoming faster, better, and stronger in the ‘back-room’ processes, we will significantly influence the result. 

Measuring Your Capabilities and Approaches to Overcome Challenges within the Inventory & Space

When trying to optimize, change or streamline anything, you need to start with a good understanding of the task itself – as it stands today. Working closely with your customers and aligning on their needs – as this is a major reason why we do business – to meet our customer’s needs. How will we improve their ROI? Improve the Stock-turns? Their sell-through? If they win – we win. It is that simple. You need to remember that it's not only an external ‘paying’ customer that is your customer. Your internal departments need customer care. By supporting sales, supporting merchandise teams, and supporting finance colleagues you will make sure that everyone counts. You will also know where you can optimize or simplify – you will have satisfied another customer. Trust me - a great investment is to make sure you have one team member (if you are not already one) that is passionate about process documentation and cross-functional alignments. You will thank me later.

Some great opportunity we have come across is to make sure you have regular interaction with all key stakeholders. This will build a solid network and get a strong foundation that will enable projects to be accepted, managed, and completed with ease when the time comes. It is so much easier to do business with teams that know each other, even like each other, and have a history together as they are already aligned. So do invest time on this upfront. It will pay off in the long run. 

We have completed projects with great success.

-Working with larger customers on direct shipping of their products, bypassing our warehouse, shortening the lead times, and lowering local labor costs

-Global projects such as container optimization to maximize fill rate

- Working with 3rd parties to manage temporary overflow and minimize demurrage.

Approach to Strategic Planning and Good Decision-Making in Planning & Operations 

One long and crucial project is to make sure you have a consistent, reliable, and regular S&OP process. This will create an alignment of data and numbers with reviews across the business. Use this to balance your OTB and communicate sales, margin, and inventory-related forecasts to internal stakeholders. As we all know, data is not always clean and aligned, this is a good place to make sure it is. And by having regular re-alignment on sales forecast with clear cascading throughout the business to re-align accordingly. We have made sure our S&OP is fully aligned with all other financial timelines as this will give you the same data at the same time and create trust in the numbers across the business.

Strategies for Decreasing the Operational Cost and Increasing Efficiency across Operations

As mentioned earlier on in this article, I suggest you start by understanding your customers’ needs. Remember to get out there! Get close to the consumers. We can easily get comfortable hiding behind the screen and bury ourselves in data. I spent some time working in one of our outlet stores a while back. I worked the shop floor, meeting our consumers and I worked in the back room, preparing the stock to go out on the shop floor. I had long conversations with the team members, asking; if you could wish for anything when it comes to your products in stores – what would that be? Don’t put any limitations on the conversation, wishes, or requirements. Just let anything that comes out be an opening for an opportunity for you to improve for someone else. If you keep asking into the statements further and further, you will eventually come down to the core.

• We want to save time

• Would be great with having fewer touchpoints

• I would like to deliver a higher sell-through

• We need to spend more time on the shop floor

Then you can start figuring out what and how can you make it a reality. How can you deliver to this specific customer with a need?

"Your internal departments need customer care. By supporting sales, supporting merchandise teams, and supporting finance colleagues you will make sure that everyone counts"

• With up-stream efficiencies, VAS projects, you will put the labor and cost with the supplier, it will allow the products to basically go straight onto the shopfloor, with no prep time needed. Stock turn, sell through, sales and margin will benefit. As well as store Teams spending less time in the back rooms, and more time on the shop floor - with the customers. such as

• pre-labelling RRP

• hanging of the products

• security tagging

• ratio packing (great for outlets and big-box retailers)

• de-stuffing paper from footwear (this is also a massive gold nugget from a sustainability POV)

Article lifecycle management. This is a big one. By making sure your product is always tended to, not hidden away in some back room, you will create opportunity to activate the product along the lifecycle. And the faster you react when you are approaching the end, the more you will be able to maximize the assortment, margin and sell through. By realigning the customer's change in demand and be agile & proactive in managing the surplus through other channels (clearance partners, own outlet, special bulk deals, etc).