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To drive efficiencies from the retail supply chain requires an improvement in the amount of control over the process, quality of communication between retailer and agencies and manufacturers, and insights that can be acted upon to produce more margin. The priority is to get a better perspective from which to see the process, and a better lens to sharpen focus of your view. It’s difficult to gain visibility over the entire private brand development process that stretches through the supply chain for a retailer. It’s even harder to reduce risks and increase your speed to market. But it is possible, and the largest retailers are developing these capabilities.

Gain Visibility. Trying to oversee a supply chain can feel like driving a car through a snowstorm without windshield wipers: unforeseen hazards can shorten the breath, and disaster might be just around that corner. Are review cycle times taking a month? Is there a pattern in the reasons why stakeholders are rejecting artwork or labels? Having the right KPIs can help you see the big picture, and steer clear of potential time-consuming obstacles. Review cycles might only need to take days, not months. If you had automatically-generated KPIs, they would make it easy for you to see exactly which parts of the process are working and which need to be fine tuned, you would be able to improve. Gaining visibility helps you drive efficiency.

Reduce Risk. When so many parties are involved throughout your supply chain, the risk of recall and lawsuits due to labeling errors seems to loom from all directions. What can private label leaders do to dramatically reduce their number of sleepless nights? Having an automated workflow ensures that every decision maker gives appropriate input on product information and artwork and labels before they are sent to the printer. Powerful tools like online proofing provide a rapid feedback mechanism to review hi-res files in a time-saving concurrent review, versus a lengthy linear review process. Giving decision-makers the ability to log on from virtually anywhere and make annotations that are viewable to their colleagues makes the process more efficient. But it’s the ability to examine, modify and approve everything from dielines, labels, FSIs, Video and other marketing material that makes the approval process far more efficient and much less error-prone.  

Accelerate to Market. A key warning sign of inefficiency is delivering your products to market late. When your supply chain is efficient, products get to market on time. When you can reduce the amount of time each review cycle takes, and you can reduce the number of cycles, your time to market is improved by a multiplying factor. Further, a centralized, self-service Digital Asset Library can remove the need to spend lots of time searching for, distributing or reformatting private brand assets into different file types.

 

Topics: BLUE, Retail