Retail

The network of trading partners is in constant motion and yesterday's best practices will offer no competitive differentiation tomorrow. One Network is the only solution that recognizes that a supply chain is in fact a network and should be treated as one.

Retail supply chains today operate in dynamic environments in which conditions change, often on a daily or even hourly basis, and require continuous collaboration and execution adjustments across the business network. Product lifecycles are becoming shorter, the network of trading partners is in constant motion and yesterday’s best practices will offer no competitive differentiation tomorrow. One Network is the only solution that recognizes that a supply chain is in fact a network and should be treated as one. It offers an integrated Demand Driven Replenishment, Distribution, Manufacturing and Transportation solution that spans across customers, suppliers, carriers, and the different internal departments and manages all functions from the point of consumption to the origin of supply. Since it is built on state of the art technology, the implementation can be deployed one service at a time with sophisticated integration to legacy applications, while providing visibility between the processes.

“You only need one unique sales forecast to drive a retail supply chain. The retail store is both the beginning and the end of retail supply chains…. If you forecast at the retail store, the need to forecast anywhere else in the supply chain completely vanishes.”

Flowcasting the Retail Supply Chain
Andre Martin

A joint study by GMA, FMI and CIES revealed that the world wide out of stock levels average 8%, causing 4% loss of sales for a typical retailer. These numbers translate to a $32 Million loss for every $1 Billion in sales. The study also revealed that out of stock levels for promoted items average 16%, establishing the fact that the situation is even more critical for retail promotions. Retailers are facing many challenges related to out of stocks, promotions, inventory costs, and software and hardware maintenance costs. The root causes behind these challenges are:

• Lack of transparency. There is no transparency across the disparate systems used by the different departments and enterprises. This creates unnecessary latencies in the propagation of demand–supply signals further exacerbating the bull whip effect of demand and supply variability.
• Retailers create different forecasts at different levels. These forecasts never matched as they were generated by different systems, were disconnected, and were expressed in mutually exclusive units of measure.
• Current systems insufficient. The existing systems provide visibility into historical problems and issues but they will neither calculate future (or projected) stock outs or other issues nor will they predict the effect and create, prioritize, or take required action to satisfy the projected increase in the demand.
• Increasing IT costs. The overhead costs of operating and maintaining the several disparate systems that retailers use to manage their supply chains are causing the IT costs to soar.

At One Network, we understand retailers’ challenges and that each retailer is unique in how they manage their businesses, work with their partners, use their current systems, and would architect their future solutions. To cater to these different requirements of the retailers and to reduce their total cost of ownership, One Network uses Software as a Service (SaaS) architecture. With this architecture, each solution is offered as a service that can be availed independently or in conjunction with other services. Furthermore, supply chains gain an almost immediate time-to-value from shorter development cycles, a benefit of the solutions being available as services. The One Network Platform incorporates the ability to seamlessly integrate with, supplement, and add value to legacy applications. One Network’s retail solutions also address each of the root causes described in the above paragraph:

• One Network provides the much needed visibility between the different processes. Each retail process and its users have immediate access to all the data inherent in the supply chain, such as store forecast, point of sale, and balance on-hand, based on their respective permissions.
• One Network’s solution generates a single store forecast. The demand at each upstream tier, called dependent demand, is calculated from the store forecast and other transactional data.
• The advanced analytics offer data mining capabilities and alerts providing visibility into historical issues such as forecast errors, current out of stocks etc. These are the standard capabilities offered by the traditional solutions. Additionally, One Network also uses intelligent engines to predict future issues such as projected out of stocks, projected lost sales etc. These engines continuously plan and re-plan the items with issues and execute the required actions (example, creating an additional order) to resolve these future issues.
• Since all One Network solutions are built on the same platform, and each solution is offered as a service, the maintenance and overhead costs are significantly reduced.

Top Retail SaaS offerings from One Network

• OneNet℠: OneNet℠ allows the retailers and the trading partners to share their master data and the transactional data like Point of Sale, Balance On Hand, Store Forecast etc to sense the demand patterns, rapidly respond to them and make them demand-driven.
• Demand Sensing: Traditional demand management has been content with passive demand management, largely within the four walls of the enterprise.  The ability to sense actual demand consumption and detect anomalies at the most granular level (Ex. Shelf stock-out, phantom inventory, poor sales, etc.) is known as Demand Sensing. 
• Shelf Driven Replenishment and Order Management: One Network's Shelf Driven Replenishment & Order Management is one-of-a-kind solution where both the retail and the consumer product companies and all their internal departments use the same solution to replenish a product all the way from the retail store shelf to the manufacturer factories. The solution provides multi-tier replenishment while attempting to maintain inventory levels within a certain target range and minimizing costs and maximizing revenues.
• Last Minute Allocation: One Network's Last Minute Allocation is the industry's first solution that makes use of the postponement technique and most optimally allocates the available supply.
• Forecast Disaggregation: One Network's Forecast Disaggregation creates an item-store level forecast using any existing aggregate forecast at say DC, Region or Channel.
• Appointment Scheduling: Appointment Scheduling automates the traditionally manual pickup and delivery appointment process.  It streamlines dock pickup and receiving processes and eliminates phone and fax scheduling.