The top three business issues regarding supply chain planning and execution are increasing availability without increasing stockholding – highlighted by 62% of retailers, followed by reducing stockholding without impacting sales (47%) and in joint third automating key processes and better collaboration with suppliers (44% each).
This is according to a new survey ‘State of the Retail Supply Chain 2016’ report, from Martec International and RELEX.
The research asked retailers from the UK, North America, Germany and the Nordics, with annual sales exceeding $110 million, about the top issues affecting supply chain planning and execution; the challenges they face with forecasting, the visibility they have of their supply chain, whether they operate a single stock pool across all sales channels and how productive their staff are.
Some of the key findings include:
- The number one forecasting challenge globally is forecasting effectively across the supply chain (69%), followed by forecasting effectively for promotions and promotional lift (64%) and forecasting heavily seasonal items (60%)
- 58% of retailers can’t accurately forecast future out of stocks with their current system.
- Analysis and reporting on the supply chain remains a key global challenge, with the production of reports, both standard and ad hoc, taking an average of 79 and 110 minutes respectively
“It is interesting to discover that whilst 64% of retailers globally highlighted forecasting for promotions as one of their main challenges, only 35% have a system in place that can build automatic demand forecast for promotions and only 22% have a system that can manage promotion stock run to clear fixtures for the next promotion,” said Mikko Kärkkäinen, Group CEO, RELEX Solution.
