Supply Chain Management Special technology report
“
Cloud computing and SaaS enables manufacturers to improve forecast accuracy and provide more reliable demand visibility, leading to enhanced customer delivery performance, improved cash flow and reduced inventory across the supply chain.”
– Razat Gaurav, JDA Software.
monitoring. Adding in event-driven architecture (EDA), the integration can pro- actively push data, work activities, and exception notifications to users. This is not just a matter of improving the links between SCM and ERP or WMS, but a wholesale re- imagining of how software can talk to other pieces of software to accelerate business processes.”
And how can companies tailor their Warehouse Management System (WMS) to
specifically integrate multi-channel requirements? Sears-Black comments that to deal with the challenges posed by multichannel supply chain strategies, companies and, in particular, retailers will require a solution that sits outside traditional supply chain systems, one that aggregates data and integrates with the full distribution network – including all the warehouses, stores, in-transit inventory and vendors – to provide a consolidated and centralised view of inventory across the network. “This will allow a retailer to respond, in a split second to a purchase request,” he said.
Operating under a single roof
According to Sears-Black, the software managing this complexity needs to be applied in layers. “First it is important to lay a foundation where the retailer gains good visibility of inventory within its own warehouse and distribution operation, through
multichannel enabled Warehouse
Management Software,” he said. “This approach allows a multichannel retailer to operate under a single roof rather than in silos. Once the foundation is in place you can then introduce an extended enterprise system over the top to gain visibility outside the warehouse to the store network and to the ‘extended network’, including drop ship vendors and third party logistics operated fulfilment facilities. This will enable far clearer decision-making, giving the ability to maintain inventory in different areas and locations.”
Then, says Sears- Black, comes the order
www.logisticsit.com
management system to coordinate the process by taking in demand from
multiple channels so that it can be optimised across the inventory which could include inventory in the warehouse, retail store,
dot.com, inbound or with the suppliers. “Importantly, the order management system provides end customers a view of their order regardless of how they’re currently interacting with the retailer,” he said, “be it in a store, on the website, or on a mobile device. Distributed Order Management systems also enable cross channel processes, such as buy online and pick up or return to store.”
Michelle Campbell, supply chain industry director
In essence, Sears-Black believes retail organisations are faced with both a challenge and an opportunity. “The challenge comes in the form of needing to ‘see more’ – moving beyond the simple view of inventory held in high street stores or at the distribution centre, and widening the field of vision to encompass all the channels through which the company interfaces with the consumer. By being able to see - and make available for sale - as much inventory as possible, the opportunity presents itself to ‘sell more’. Those that ‘see more’ will ‘sell more’.”
Differentiators
What are some of the main functionality differentiators among the SCM -related software vendor community? Turner believes the SCM community writes, necessarily in his view, a lot of bespoke software, “and we would always expect a new contract or customer win to involve an element of this,” he said. “Some of the newer approaches try to build a very feature-rich system that can then be configured rather than developed for different applications. For me it remains to be seen which approach will ultimately win.” For Bursa, one of the main differentiators is the breadth and flexibility of the supply chain solutions available. “As supply chain networks
October 2011
MANUFACTURING &LOGISTICS
IT 15
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