Supply chain collaboration in Retail Enterprise

mmoin — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 23:42:00 GMT

Retail business is at an inflection point. Customers are becoming ever demanding. They are expecting same experience across many channels and retailers are challenged to meet the demands and build loyalty. In addition due to the outsourcing trend, most of the manufacturing has moved to the far east, which means huge challenges in the supply chian area. So supply chain managment has become ever more critical and retailers are looking for ways to cut down the costs associated with the inventory management, while trying to establish better visibility into the supply chain pipeline. They are looking at technology to provide the relief by addressing the pain points in managing the supply chain.

Luckily technology is around to help in this space. Office Business Applications (OBA) platform is a powerful platform for building supplier collaboration tool that can help in collaborating with the suppliers in real time. OBA has the technology and tools to build an application that can help in real time collaboration between retailers and suppliers. Excel server and the sharepoint server of OBA platform are the key components that provide the necessary technology to achieve this. When demand fluctuations happen at the retail end, changes have to be communicated to the supplier in real time for fullfillment. Supplier will analyze the changes in demand and respond in real time if the new figures can be fulfilled or not. Retailer receives the supplier response and adjusts the marketing, promotional and pricing plans accordingly.

Microsoft recently relieased a Reference Architecture Pack (RAP) to showcase how this application can be built. There is a white paper and couple of decks and the RAP itself, which can be downloaded along with the complete code for demo and education. It can be further extended into a complete feature rich application

ARC Thoughts : office business application

Supply chain collaboration in Retail Enterprise