Month: May 2022

In today’s competitive world, being & remaining agile is key. Brands must be adaptive enough to react quickly when any factor affects demand or supply. Otherwise, they run the real risk of halting the entire production process. Moreover, revenue-based dependencies can easily falter upon improper or apathetic monitoring of trends. As you’re aware, supply chain management can be very precarious to handle, as it entails many uncertainties & unexpected challenges. These can range from being impacted by shortages to more niche-related issues, such as contract disputes between two brands that supply & demand production.

This is where demand sensing steps in. So, let us briefly run through what it is & does?

Demand sensing — Definition and its importance in the supply chain

Demand sensing is a process of continually monitoring & reacting to varying trends in the supply chain. By deploying the power of AI (Artificial Intelligence) & it is empowering plus contributing counterparts of ML (Machine Learning), live data analysis can ensue. Such statistical extrapolation & predictive analytics will help forecast the future (especially when economic turmoil is concerned). This allows brands to better prepare themselves for the unknown as and when it may happen. It is a culmination of this which we refer to as the ‘demand sensing process.’.

Importance of demand sensing:

Demand sensing vs. Demand planning

Demand sensing operates on the principle of sorting through & evaluating voluminous data to identify the factor that has the largest impact on demand. Its software runs downstream data to alert stakeholders upon stock shortages, etc.

Demand planning, on the other hand, is more related to creating a strategy to deal with fluctuating demand. Sales forecasting is imperative to ensure that not too little or much is done to maintain a continual revenue stream without overly hindering issues. This cross-functional feature achieves a balance between customer satisfaction & their demand and supplier’s supply capacity to fulfill that demand. Hence, you will never be either over or understocked. Various statistical models can be used here, including linear regression, moving averages, seasonal trends, or following a sales forecast itself.

TradeEdge Demand Sensing —Strengthening supply chain efficiency

TradeEdge Demand Sensing solution provides “actionable insights by aggregating real-time data about product sales and inventory across multiple channels.”

TradeEdge Demand Sensing helps enterprises optimize functions across the entire spectrum of demand planning, helping them improve accuracy, efficiency, and manage unpredictability to drive business growth.

Let’s take a look at an example.

Our client, a global clothing retail company, was looking to strengthen its position as a leading omnichannel retailer and focus on consumer experience by emphasizing data-driven decisions. The need of the hour was to gain access to their wholesale network data. With TradeEdge, they enabled 99% first-time-right secondary sales data by harmonizing data from disparate sources.

Demand sensing has thus become an essential part of supply chain management due to its intuitiveness & live responsiveness. Hence, by applying demand sensing solutions, organizations can operate with greater efficiency, speed & scalability to adapt to any unexpected disruptions in the future supply chain.

Visibility and control are critical for businesses to derive total value from their supply chain processes. Without a doubt, great products and a firm brand name lay the foundation for optimal growth. Sadly, though, a broken supply chain and an opaque network of supplier-distributors-logistics can be significant hindrances. With the complexity of modern supply chains, tying them all together into
a coherent whole and building supply chain harmony increasingly require a technological edge and data.

Data is one of the missing links here, which, when adequately harmonized, can make the whole process, from suppliers to sales, as clear as crystal.

How can enterprises leverage technology to gain more visibility and utilize insights to control their operations effectively? Let’s look at how enterprises can harness the power of advanced technologies to gain insights, thus creating supply chain harmony.

Achieving end-to-end visibility in modern supply chains

Communication is vital to creating supply chain harmony and achieving end-to-end visibility. That is possible only when information on how each element in the supply chain works is available to everyone in the network. Big data plays a pivotal role here, but not data presented in an unstructured manner.

The data harmonization process considers all efforts to collect, collate, and combine data from multiple sources. Then, the same data is presented to users in a structured way to view what is expected and what is happening closely.

Today, most businesses have their footprints spread across the globe. Hence, it becomes imperative for them to coordinate with local vendors, retailers, and distributors to reach hyper-local customers. It’s no wonder that achieving end-to-end visibility is critical to developing supply chain management. And data is essential for enabling supply chain harmony. However, one of the most challenging aspects is to have visibility – adding a high degree of digitally-enabled visibility into the supply chain. This requires organizations to enhance oversight of internal processes and extend the reach of information flows upstream in the supply chain.

But, the modern supply chain has a complicated web of data, and in specific instances, sufficient information is not available due to various silos. In order for businesses to gain a complete picture, it’s essential to centralize, catalog, and manage this constant data flow.

This is where Control towers play a vital role in tying a supply chain into a coherent whole that has end-to-end visibility. These centralized decision-making and data dashboards bring together the information critical for that supply chain and allow for rapid analysis and action. Businesses are focused on achieving total customer satisfaction. In order to reach the stage, the former needs to bring together all the data available in the market, from the supplier’s end, from the customers that are buying from other tier-one suppliers, and from the distributor’s end, into a centralized system for easy accessibility, which is the harmonization of data

Feeding market demand into supply chains

Data collating is not the end of the journey; instead, it is just a new beginning. The primary task commences post when the consolidated data is processed and analyzed to extract actionable insights.

Further, feeding demand data into supply chains increases efficiency in understanding demand patterns, opening up demand-side information to the broader supply chain, and improving supply chain collaboration and resiliency.

Enterprises today are looking to make demand signal flow all the way to the uppermost point in the value chain, which is the raw material supplier, thus making the entire process seamless and optimizing the networks to reduce friction. Thus, getting the market signals as quickly as possible and then responding quickly will help improve supply chain collaboration and inventory worries. Data transparency smooths out the nervousness in the chain, leading to better functioning of logistics and forecasting. And, data harmonization lays down the foundation for a collaborative supply chain.

Being agile by using Automation

Leveraging Automation can help businesses free logistics professionals from a host of background tasks and address the huge number of potential variables that affect a moderately sized supply chain. In developed markets, PoS information can run into several gigabytes of data every day, depending on the granularity of such information. The frequency of sharing that information and the granularity of sharing that information cause data explosion.

Analytical tools powered by AI and ML capabilities process data presented harmoniously, extract granular insights and feed the supply chain with the correct information in real-time. This allows a planner to see what inventory was held up even when in transit, understand the business-critical items, and immediately move to a mitigation strategy and potentially charter airfreight for essential items within hours.

In a nutshell, timely and consistent data that flows back to the suppliers is critical as it provides them with an open platform to input their stock or open up inventory availability directly to suppliers and distributors.

Thus, taking the improved data generated by better collaboration and turning that into automated insights and actions helps improve supply chain visibility and immunes businesses from unforeseen disruptions. Availability of data can help create supply chain harmony.

Data is paramount for every business, especially when making important decisions or formulating new strategies. In e-commerce, a colossal amount of data lies untapped across its operations, supply-distribution networks, and customer services. In their granular form, such data can create awareness regarding market trends, shifts in consumer buying behaviors and competitors, and disruptions occurring deep down in the demand-supply-value chain.

With the help of e-commerce data, such crucial information is collected from different touchpoints and processed to make data-driven decisions.

What is e-commerce data, and how does it help businesses?

As per statistics, nearly 49% of business leaders agree that analytics help with better decision-making, and 10% of the other respondents stated that such analytics improve relationships with end customers and other partners.

But, navigating through the massive datasets and numbers is overwhelming and manually extracting and analyzing such data often paint half-truths due to granular data omission or erring when extracting data from bulk documents.

However, with the help of the right tools and technology, such hurdles can be easily overcome.

E-commerce data is drawn from multiple sources such as:

Once the available data is harnessed, it can be put to practical usage in several areas, such as:

Sales trend and share analysis: It is crucial to understand the sales trend and market share analysis of one’s own business and competitors. With e-commerce data, information about the above categories is easily tracked versus competitors across key categories and brands.

Media performance analysis: Big e-commerce businesses spend millions of dollars in marketing procurement and execution to outreach a broad customer base, both hyper-local and those living beyond the national borders. Analyzing media performance is crucial for multiple reasons, especially during budget allocation. Consolidating media performance metrics, including ROAS, ACOS, CPM, CTR, and Impressions, and measuring them weekly, quarterly, monthly, or annually is one of the critical functions of optimizing media spending.

Organic search performance: Identifying leading organic search terms and focusing on SEO strategies to rank them helps e-commerce companies identify areas where their search strategy is winning or losing.

Profitability analysis: Making use of e-retailer PoS data (Profit Per Unit and Cost of Goods Sold) to determine optimum product margin vs. thresholds. The output paints a clear picture of whether the business is generating enough profit or is simply hitting a blank wall.

Inventory planning: To optimally utilize existing inventories, e-commerce data analytics software leveraging AI/ML capabilities determines how much stock is needed to meet the market demand. This enables e-commerce owners to have direct control over their inventories and plan their supply accordingly.

Lost buy box analysis: Data analytics in e-commerce determines the factors driving Lost Buy Box by using data from the PDP (Product Detail Page).

Ratings and review analysis: Storefront insights extracted from user ratings and reviews help e-commerce owners identify underperforming SKUs compared to the competition. Businesses then work on the weak areas to address the common issues based on user complaints. They connect with them to listen to their inputs and address them to enhance customer satisfaction.

Share of search analysis: With the help of e-commerce data, analysis of paid/organic search performance can help businesses draw insights from their campaign execution and take measures for underperforming.

Product page content compliance: Product content and integrity analysis compare the content with internal company content to check for any compliance issues and address them immediately.

Mining for e-commerce gold with technology – The best way to win with e-commerce

E-commerce companies are gold mines of data. With the TradeEdge platform, businesses can gain valuable insights. Such e-commerce data analytics can paint a clear picture of where their business stands in the market vs. competition.

TradeEdge is a cloud-based solution that provides insights across the demand value chain, similar to the points above, for accelerating profitable growth and getting one step closer to an autonomous supply chain.

Hence, e-commerce businesses benefit immensely from gaining maximum channel visibility, adding new channel partners, improving retail execution, and faster reaching new markets.

Supply chain is an integral part of executing business success, from procurement sources to logistics and end-users – all are finely woven into its intricate network web, each playing a critical role. The execution of the supply chain attracts significant attention because this area is ripe for cost savings if things are done right. Harnessing advanced analytics can provide the most-wanted insights into how each element functions independently and together as a unit to ensure the steady flow of goods, even in the face of unprecedented challenges.

Today, supply chains are becoming increasingly complex, with several partners getting added to the network to cater to the needs of overseas customers. Hence, optimizing supply chain execution with analytics is more important than ever.

What is supply chain execution?

Supply chain execution encompasses the myriad tasks making up the supply chain and their steady flow, from procurement, sourcing, order fulfillment, and warehousing to transportation of end goods to customers. Every step in the supply chain leaves behind an array of information.

With the help of advanced analytics, such insights are extracted in real-time and shared with concerned partners to optimize the process accordingly and make it immune to any sudden disruptions, predictable or unpredictable.

For example, the supply chain network of Consumer Goods companies is ridden with many challenges, impeding their growth. These challenges include:

Evaluating the importance of supply chain analytics

Supply chain analytics is the analysis of information drawn from the various elements connected to the company’s supply chain. One miscalculation or error in either of the processes creates a domino effect, rippling through the network and impacting every element along the way. This will leave the customers heavily unsatisfied. Hence, timely availability of supply chain analytics can save the business millions of dollars and its reputation.

The following are the benefits of optimizing supply chain execution with analytics for businesses:

Improved visibility: Businesses need to get a comprehensive eagle-eye view of their supply chain. Data and analytics shared on a single cloud-native platform help businesses and other concerned parties spot patterns and anomalies in a particular location, analyze the data and take actions accordingly.

Better understanding and mitigating risks: Again, identifying market patterns from historical data and present disruptions equips businesses with the knowledge and foresight to promptly create fail-safe plans to mitigate timely.

Supply chain planning enhanced: Supply chain planning is based on market demand for goods and services. Real-time insights provide such data based on which future planning is carried out effectively.

More customers satisfied: Better planning and timely address of disruptions improve customer satisfaction significantly. With the help of supply chain analytics, businesses can match the delivery promise to customers and reduce the loss of business to competitors.

Higher profitability: The whole purpose of supply chain analytics is to ensure businesses save as much cost from the network and identify opportunities to scale efficiency and profitability.

Driving insights to action with TradeEdge

TradeEdge Platform captures insights across the demand value chain and makes them available to every person responsible for decision-making in the supply chain. Such insights accelerate profitable growth and foster an autonomous supply chain.

This cloud-based solution enables brands to gain maximum channel visibility, add new channel partners, improve retail execution and reach new markets faster.

Greater logistics effectiveness and efficiency are not just gained by focusing on goods production and transit. Supply chain resilience also depends upon a smooth operation inside a company focusing resources on critical problems, reacting flexibly to a wide range of scenarios, and bringing in stakeholders from across the business to weigh up the options and make the right decisions.

Silos are insular workgroups functioning as individual entities inside the organization. These entities maintain negligible communication with other teams and the outside world.

These silos can affect the supply chain and your organization’s overall performance.

What is supply chain resilience, and how are silos affecting it negatively?

A resilient supply chain refers to its capacity to resist and recover from any disruption caused by predictable and unpredictable factors. The term also defines the ability of the value chain to bounce back quickly, adopt new policies and find new ways to mitigate risks in the demand-supply network. When organizations employ multiple sourcing channels, ensuring the unhindered supply of raw materials and others from numerous routes can achieve supply chain resilience.

Organization silos can be detrimental to building supply chain resiliency. But who is responsible for these silos? The lack of the flow of information and a collaborative framework indirectly feed silos in the organization. Each department sets up goals that eventually conflict with the purposes of the other departments.

Then, there are data silos to consider. When crucial insights are collected and recorded by one department but not shared with others, silos appear, which impacts the company’s decision-making as a whole.

How can organizations break silos to build a resilient supply chain?

To break the shackles of silos and achieve supply chain resiliency, businesses should follow specific approaches; a few of which are described below:

Creating internal clarity

The sales and marketing functions may not be 100% aligned and connected to many supply chain functions. This reduces visibility and creates internal friction as supply chain teams struggle with new product launches or demand fluctuations, while sales and marketing lack awareness of what is possible from a logistics perspective.

Hence, it is critical to look closely at how the business aligns across functions and how information is disseminated, utilized, and acted upon.

The break in internal silos helps increase the clarity of its overall objectives and how it plans to achieve them, allowing the company’s top leaders to manage operations timely and efficiently. Sharing information from the lowest plant level up to the head of the organization results in prompt and updated situational awareness about any crisis and initiating actions accordingly. Any minor disruption at any point in the supply chain can rapidly cascade downwards, meaning if one business unit has been affected immediately, other business units get affected very soon.

Therefore, businesses should encourage cross-organizational coordination and sharing of information to build a resilient supply chain. This allows suppliers to proactively share information with the purchasing department to facilitate the collation of the best data on a particular day of a certain week in order to make the best decision for the subsequent production forecasts.

Prioritizing disruptions

Frequent internal meetings between departments not only break the existing silos but also work together to minimize the potential for significant disruption in the supply chain. By bringing more than two heads together, they quickly focus on key areas or particular moments of disorder. “What are the most critical materials and sub-components? Where are the transportation bottlenecks?”

These are the questions that supply chain planners need to ask in order to prioritize the correct route in their planning as soon as an adverse event occurs and then cascade that through their organization and straight to key suppliers. They should focus on what they need to be monitoring and then which levers to pull, so they can prioritize that in the moment and not waste time figuring out what is going on and what direction to take.

Keeping on top of changing scenarios

Creating an outlook and a plan for the complete unknown can cause severe headaches for supply chain professionals. Usually, the disruptive circumstances are unprecedented, for instance, the COVID pandemic. Outside of global conflict, there hasn’t been a comparable point where different international trade and production elements have been affected severely.

Hence, one can conclude that the forecasts are unreliable. Increasing the frequency of planning meetings and building close coordination across organizations is essential. Equally crucial is to have shared knowledge about the most functionally critical and vulnerable elements existing within the supply chain. Experts believe scenario planning and utilizing digital twins in a sandbox environment is the best way for businesses to build resilient supply chains. These can take a real-world structure and allow planners to change critical variables to understand how a scenario will play out.

Once scenarios are planned out, it is vital to share these with business-critical suppliers then, so that when an issue strikes, every key player in the supplier chain follows the same rule book.

Conclusion

Before drawing any inferences, businesses should focus their attention internally and understand how silos within the four walls create bottlenecks in the entire value chain. Supply chain resilience is achievable only when the walls are broken down and information is shared unhindered downwards to the lowest levels.