The retail industry has been rapidly evolving, driven by changes in consumer preferences, technological advancements, and intense competition. Customers now strongly influence product trends through their reviews and social media presence and often perform extensive online research before making a purchase. In 2023, total US retail sales will hit $4.7 trillion, of which online sales will top $1.1 trillion. 

As businesses adapt to the new realities of the digital age, supply chain management in retail (SCM) has emerged as a potential competitive edge. SCM refers to the end-to-end management of goods and services, from raw materials to final product delivery. Retailers can differentiate themselves from the competition by providing a reliable supply chain and supporting sustainability goals. To achieve this, they must invest in tailored processes and application portfolios that improve the customer experience. 

Making Supply Chain Management a Competitive Advantage

Supply chain disruptions are not new, but the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the vulnerabilities of global supply chains. Such disruptions can have significant financial implications for businesses. However, proactive companies can navigate these disruptions. For example, Nike used technology to track products moving through outsourced manufacturing operations during the early stages of the pandemic. By utilizing predictive-demand analytics, the company minimized the impact of disruptions. The result? Nike’s supply chain management strategy allowed the company to track “1 billion units at 99.9% readability” Nike was able to limit sales declines in the region to just 5 percent, while competitors experienced much more significant drops in sales.  

Agility & Resilience

Agility and resilience are crucial in today’s fast-moving and consumer-centric world. Traditional supply chains are no longer adequate. Supply chain management in retail needs to be much more dynamic, predictive, and responsive to changes in demand and the product and channel mix. Investing in SCM transformation can provide several benefits for retail, distribution and wholesale, and CPG businesses. It can boost revenue and customer service by synchronizing inventory availability with local cross-channel demand, increasing revenue and margin across channels. SCM transformation can also lead to shorter lead times, accelerate inventory turnover, generate one-time working capital savings that can fund the whole program, and reduce inventory carrying costs. 

Improved Carbon Footprint:

As customers become more environmentally conscious, retailers who demonstrate their commitment to sustainability can gain a competitive edge. By investing in the transformation of supply chain management in retail, companies can efficiently place their inventory in the network ahead of anticipated demand and closer to customers, reducing their carbon footprint. This approach not only contributes to environmental sustainability but also enhances customer satisfaction. The Science Based Targets Initiative reported that in 2020, 94 percent of the 239 companies that joined the initiative made commitments to reducing emissions from their customers and suppliers.

The Next Steps:

Supply chain management in retail has always been complex, but recent global events have highlighted the need for increased resilience, agility, and sustainability. However, simply adding these priorities to existing systems won’t cut it anymore. A complete shift in mindset is required to integrate them into supply chain design, organization, and operation. This shift in mindset starts with top-level changes and the incorporation of risk, agility, and sustainability performance indicators. By prioritizing these indicators, retailers can begin to understand the key drivers of their supply chain risk and take proactive steps to mitigate them.

It’s time to take action and make these priorities a reality. To stay ahead of the curve and learn more about these changing trends, take advantage of this on demand webcast. This is an opportunity to gain the latest insights and learn how to integrate resilience, agility, and sustainability into all aspects of supply chain design, organization, and operation.

Exploring PartnerLinQ’s Extensible Platform with Native Applications

The post disruption New Normal brings with it valuable lessons as we begin the new year. The importance of flexibility, visibility, velocity, and resilience are among those lessons and while many faced a fluid and unexpected path, most did emerge with a clearer understanding of what to expect over the next few years and how to overcome obstacles.

At PartnerLinQ we believe that resilience is a key to continued success in the New Normal. Flexibility, visibility, and velocity are the pieces that combine to build that resilience.

Before the disruptions of the last few years, flexibility, visibility, and velocity in supply chain was treated as optional, often provided by way of ‘add-on’ or ‘value- add’ services which is not quite good enough anymore.

Today’s emergent iPaaS and SaaS solutions are designed to meet evolving integration needs by providing API connections and transformations in easy to consume, point and click modules that connect one system to another in a SaaS environment. In short, this enables interoperability between systems quickly.

PartnerLinQ is not unlike many of the iPaaS, Cloud, and SaaS solutions built for the cloud and ease of use; but it is the Native Apps built to provide the key supply chain context to these integrations that takes this to the next level where the solution not only connects to your supply chain but also provides the visibility and velocity of implementation required to ensure that your supply chain is resilient as well.

PartnerLinQ’s App Extensible Platform

While many of our competitors1 continue to sell the “competitive advantage” of value-added networks, the concept of the network has shifted significantly. With PartnerLinQ, YOU own your network.

PartnerLinQ’s App extensible platform helps you connect with your supply chain quickly and easily, which translates into a significantly better ROI and a real competitive advantage.2

PartnerLinQ’s apps can be added to your PartnerLinQ subscription by a simple click of a button delivering instant value to your existing connection.

Here are some of the key Business Process Apps that are available:

Business Process Apps

• Order to Cash
• Procure to Pay
• E-commerce Order Management
• Cross-Dock, Direct to Consumer and Drop Shipments
• Return Verification & Management
• Freight Integration & Shipment Status Messaging
• Returns Management

Order to Cash

The Order to Cash App provides visibility into the Order to Cash process for both B2B and D2C business. This app gives you real time insights into your business in terms of value delivered and bottlenecks, allowing you to optimize the experience for your customers.

Procure to Pay

Procure to Pay works the same way through the PartnerLinQ Platform App, integrating your system and ensuring that your business, systems, and team are resilient, and now have a digitized, automated procure-to-pay process. Installed, configured, and activated within minutes by our team or yours, your team can easily manage buys, approvals, payments, suppliers and supply chain visibility and compliance on a global scale and in real time.

We’ve made processing inbound invoices simple with prebuilt integrations to more than 70 ERP, TMS, WMS systems. Robotic Process Automation also ensures that your team can convert your manual invoice processes into electronic transactions at the “Speed of Business.”

E-commerce – Order Management

PartnerLinQ’s extensible platform with native applications E-commerce – Order Management app unlocks real-time interactive shopping experiences by allowing seamless visibility to your products and inventory to boost online sales and increase customer engagement. Run your eCommerce business from the desktop, delivered your way, according to your schedule, providing flexibility, visibility, and velocity in a nimble, scalable platform

Cross-Dock, Direct to Consumer and Drop Shipments

Drop Shipment through the PartnerLinQ Platform App provides a seamless experience for Cross-Dock, Direct to Consumer and/or drop-ship environments.

The PartnerLinQ Drop Shipment App provides for the ability to onboard and connect with your drop ship partners and work with their catalogs in a seamless way, providing express distribution and or delivery requirements for your location and for your partners. The app includes detailed specifications for electronics, food service, and drug supply chains with precise traceability requirements without the need for yet another project.

Freight Integration & Shipment Status Messaging

The PartnerLinQ App makes freight integration effortless by connecting with the Top TL, LTL, Intermodal, logistics and Third-Party operators through the Platform. Tenders and responses are the lifeblood of the supply chain. Ensuring the right goods reach the right place at the right time is critical to supply chains in the New Normal. When it comes to deep freight integration, PartnerLinQ is ready and connects with more than 1,000 Land, Sea, and Air freight operators, handlers, and carriers, all available through our extensible platform with native applications.

Instant Ocean makes Land, Sea, and Air Visibility possible, and PartnerLinQ makes it happen. Your Port – Your Container, Trans-Atlantic, Trans-Pacific and everywhere in between. Our support team will be there, if needed, to ensure that 100% of your freight shipments are tracked from your ERP to destination with shipment status updates by way of email messages or infinitely scalable reporting.

Return Verification & Management

Returns Management, a feature often overlooked by our competitors, is also available. The PartnerLinQ Platform App provides a seamless experience for managing any type of returns including the Returns ASN for the cosmetics industry (RASN).

Drug supply chains are also enabled through the PartnerLinQ App whether you are ready to leverage EPCIS or not, and the GS1 Verification Messaging Standard is available from within PartnerLinQ.

Returns can be configured for delivery to your warehouse or a third party and, if needed, verification or validation is available to PartnerLinQ subscribers in just a few clicks.

[1] Are Value-Added Networks the Way to go for B2B Communication?

[2] Value-added networks provide competitive advantage

On a warm morning in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, at a symposium in 2005 the Chief Economist and Director of Research at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) made the following statement…

“While the techniques and instruments to absorb fluctuations have improved, there is uncertainty about how they will perform in a serious downturn.”

The speaker was Ragham Rajan and while he was widely ridiculed at the time, his speech would prove to be prophetic. The 2007-08 financial crisis to follow occurred because market changes and advancements were concentrating risk despite appearing to diversify risk.

The Great Disruption

The world is witnessing an unprecedented level of disruption beginning with COVID-19, followed by supply chain issues, and a growing disruption within the labor market. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the flight of workers from the hospitality industry in September, with a reported 863,000 leaving their positions, fully 6.6% of the hospitality workforce. Across the world we see acute shortages for commodities, including computer chips, furniture, and mobile devices among them. Fortunately, there are no nationwide shortages of food. Although in some cases we might have certain foods with low inventory, food production and manufacturing are widely dispersed in North America. Global Industrialization is suffering, and many manufacturers in the US are reporting a wait of more than 90 days to procure materials and assemble parts to make their products.

The Disruption Today

Beyond the supply chain shortages and bottlenecks there are multiple causes for disruption. The emerging cause can be attributed to a shortage of labor, especially truck drivers, which has stalled production operations across plants, distribution points, and delivery centers. Despite rising unemployment, the gap between labor and unfilled positions is increasing.

With global production chains divided into specialized links over many decades, different industries have become inextricably connected over a period of time. Supply shocks have spread across unlikely industries, such as automobiles and semiconductors, or food and fertilizer.

Perhaps an even more visible cause for disruption lies in oversea shipping. The port crisis in the US has received global attention over the last year due to the immense buildup of ships and the never-ending influx of cargo. What supply chain professionals initially viewed as temporary is now threatening to change global shipping infrastructures from the size of ships to business practices, which relied on speed rather than on efficiency, availability, or visibility. Container ships are now circling ports and remaining at sea for longer periods increasing costs. Sea containers cost more to ship, resulting in exorbitant prices, and the accumulation of goods at shipyards, rail yards and warehouses, a direct result of the aforementioned labor shortage, dominated by a shortage of truck drivers.

Supply Chain News

Attending a supply chain conference last week for the first time in more than 18 months, I had an opportunity to listen to several speakers. One by one each delivered his or her view of what happens next, after the great disruption.

One speaker stated simply, “Supply chain is sexy again” and that caught my attention, for starters, I would agree. Having been largely automated and then ignored, the supply chain is again making news and having work in the supply chain for many years, there is more than a passing interest from John Q. Public on Supply chain matters. The speaker went on to talk about a financial newspaper with wide distribution. The paper, the speaker continued, published a mere handful of supply chain articles each month while in recent months, that handful had exploded to several articles every day. The articles, looking more critically now, are well beyond a single new outlet and appear to have a wide array of supply chain perspectives. Reflections of the articles range in impact from the DOW to the NASDAQ and from Retail to CPG and from staples to emerging technologies and in the virtual world these articles are boundless, including this one, which brings us to the following observation.

Stress Testing the Supply Chain

The string of supply chain disruption following the pandemic has resulted in the biggest stress test for supply chain leaders the world over, retail executives in North America anticipate issues to last beyond 2022. What appeared at first to be temporary has now turned into a series of long-lasting setbacks, some perhaps resulting in a permanent state of disruption in some industries. Considering the nearly two years since the onset, when and how these disruptions will end remain a matter of conjecture. The answers are not to be found, not in anyone’s tea leaves, not yet.

The Future of Supply Chain

In order to future-proof, supply chain leaders are facing factors of change that have not been previously considered or discussed, solutions from worker migration to flexible labor practices and the movement of sourcing to new sourcing centers in emerging markets or those which can be more closely controlled or deliver an environmentally neutral position. The solution is in resolving multiple issues in the supply chain as it did way back when plastic hangers seemingly changed to black overnight.

The Solution Approach

Renewing the approach to transparency and visibility across the supply chain is critical in light of the uncertain future in this period of the Great Disruption, now clearly extended, with no end in sight. Increased transparency can better prepare stakeholders to deal with changing regulatory, environmental or compliance requirements while solving supply chain dilemmas. Visibility, through better partner communication, is becoming increasingly important to supply chain leaders that I spoke with at the conference. The importance of end-to-end communication with suppliers and partners across the trading network from their perspective cannot be overstated. Through the right technology, organizations can ensure that the appropriate information is collected, stored, and disseminated, and when partners are onboarded quickly to meet these unexpected scenarios, the results are a positive impact on business and on other concerns.

Supply Chain Advantage

The PartnerLinQ advantage is its hybrid cloud architecture and easy partner onboarding, PartnerLinQ delivers a smarter B2B/B2C Integration platform with automated End-to-End Workflows and includes business rules for omnichannel integration.

PartnerLinQ’s unique approach to supply chain can help your organization communicate with your partners rapidly, ensuring end-to-end digital connectivity across all functional areas and through a centralized visibility platform.

PartnerLinQ zeroes in on issues, tracks them, and provides detailed analysis of all of your partners, including all of their inbound and outbound transactions and can generate alerts for specific partner events, delivering the insight your users need to address supply chain issues immediately.

Scan2EDI converts your manual process into electronic transactions using robotic process automation, optical character recognition, document management software, business process outsourcing, and artificial intelligence. Scan2EDI offers application integration advantages including PartnerLinQ’s ERP Integration Framework.

Instant Ocean Visibility provides container status at your fingertips. Integrated, automated, and reliable, your port – your container, Instant Ocean Visibility removes human intervention from container tracking, eliminates endless web searches, eliminates phone calls & email and eliminates voice messages and call backs.

Take control of your supply chain in the present and forge a new one for the future with PartnerLinQ. Talk with our experts to learn more.

By Kevin Balentine, PartnerLinQ