RETAILRETHINK [ INSIGHT ]
by David Food Head of Supply Chain, Board International dfood@board.com | +44 (0) 7949 541551
How to Develop a Customer-centric Supply Chain
Supply chain variability creates hurdles to customer satisfaction. Prioritize the consumer experience by integrating flexible technologies and processes in your supply chain design.
limited visibility, outside partnerships with warehouses, distribution centers, and logistics partners create more opportunities for confusion and communication blunders. When retailers don’t design for granularity in their outside partnerships, it’s difficult to share data, coordinate timing, and design for transportation and tracking needs. All these factors lead to a cumbersome returns process that potentially degrades the consumer experience. Siloed processes also make it more difficult to account for marketplace variability. Consumer behavior and supply chain logistics have changed rapidly over the past few years, and world events, sanctions, and shipping regulations require retailers to constantly redesign operational alternatives. This means building additional capacity into supply chain processes, from ensuring extra transportation modes and operators to budgeting for potential overtime. If supply chain teams work in isolation from other departments, they won’t be able to share data and coordinate logistics details that enable proactive resiliency. They’ll also struggle to meet changing standards and future evolutions.
provides end-to-end visibility to supply chain teams and logistics partners— enabling a clear and responsive customer experience. Visibility challenges are often deeply entrenched in company operations, making it hard to gain a complete picture of supply chain logistics. At many organizations, supply chain teams work in silos from other groups, which creates frustration and inefficiencies in upstream and downstream operations. Returns processes are a prime example. When companies don’t have visibility across different departments’ inventory allocations, it’s difficult to determine where products were initially bought and where they should be returned. For example, if a customer wants to return a product in-store that they bought online, limited visibility may prevent stores from accepting the item— creating consumer friction in the returns experience and triggering hurdles for reverse logistics teams. As teams work to process returns with
Supply chains with significant variability continue to create logistics challenges—with limited distribution capacity, soaring fuel costs, and all- around supply chain fatigue triggering major delivery delays. As retailers respond by increasing their supply chain scope and partnerships, they run into a major problem: limited or nonexistent visibility. In fact, 69% of companies lack total visibility into their supply chain operations, according to Zippia research. Without that visibility, retailers can’t optimize sourcing, shipping, and fulfillment. They’re also unable to provide transparency to their stores and dynamic retail experiences to customers. CLEAR AND RESPONSIVE CX By digging deep to understand the nuances of their sourcing networks, retailers can synthesize operations and integrate technologies that support a customer-centric supply chain. The result is a fulfillment process that adapts to consumer needs and
28 Inbound Logistics • December 2022
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