Where's my stuff?

When you sell online, you know that ‘Where’s my stuff?’, is the most common question customers ask – but one you are finding increasingly difficult to answer.?It is also a question that many retailers are struggling to answer for themselves.

The last 10 years have seen a dramatic increase in consumer choice for both products and how they acquire them.?This has added significant levels of complexity to retail supply chains – both inbound from suppliers but also outbound, when delivering against your customer promise.

At the same time the levels of supply chain disruption have increased.?Bain recently examined how global supply chains had been disrupted over recent years and the number of events impacting multiple periods over the past 5-6 years is startling.

The business cost of this is huge – McKinsey believe that every 4 years, supply chain disruption creates costs equating to around 4 months’ worth of earnings every decade.

Supply chain complexity is only going in one direction and the ability to deal with disruption is forcing the need for greater agility.?Meanwhile a third factor is starting to appear and making the supply chain challenge even harder.

The world has woken up to the need for environmental stewardship and this is now being reflected in consumer choices – 49% of consumers are prepared to pay more for sustainable products.?Corporations recognise this and already 44% of Fortune 500 companies are building environmental and social governance into their corporate strategies.?

Global shipping accounts for 3% of the world’s CO2, so when targeting sustainability, supply chain is a key consideration.

Re-engineering supply chains is not easy – balancing resilience, responsiveness, sustainability, and cost requires big changes.?As Bain are advising – ‘only transformational thinking can solve the problems that supply chains now face.’?

While Bain advise clients to invest in digital capabilities to connect the supply chain and change the economics, 33% of companies say their supply chain technology falls short in providing real-time insights.

Without a major rethink of supply chain and the underlying technology, the costs and implications in terms of reduced margins and unfulfilled customer promises will be significant.

While lean supply chain was previously in vogue – agility is now the order of the day.?

Imagine having composable supply chain technology which is agile enough to respond to meet the evolving needs of your business.?This would mean you could preserve margins and continue to deliver your customer promises while addressing your sustainability goals.

Delivering this requires a combination of three capabilities:

Demand planning and optimisation

Be able to predict demand using advanced artificial intelligence that applies insight from sales, marketing, external news and events to respond to dynamic market changes. ?Visualise your demand and inventory, in real-time, to facilitate optimal distribution of inventory and replenishment based on priorities - balancing speed, cost and sustainability.

Supply chain visibility

Leverage demand and supply signals to visualise your end-to-end supply chain.?Reduce out-of-stocks through optimised constraint-based planning and rules-based orchestration that can leverage real-time inventory and AI to enhance accuracy and optimise around sustainability considerations.?Improve decision-making with supply chain digital twin capabilities which enabes multi-echelon scenario planning.

Flexible fulfilment

Be able to flexibly meet your customer delivery promise, ensuring consumers can take possession by whatever means they choose – streamlining across store operations and delivery providers.?Optimise customer ordering processes and provide customers with clear visibility into inventory and current order status.

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Answering ‘where’s my stuff?’, for both consumers and retailers, is more important, yet more difficult, than ever before.?Being equipped to build a real-time, sustainable supply chain is a key retailer priority and one which Microsoft is addressing through the Microsoft Cloud for Retail – supported with retail industry-specific data models, APIs and an ecosystem of partners that are purpose built for retail-specific scenarios.

These capabilities are in use by some of the world’s most successful retailers - learn how they can deliver for you here.