SCDigest: Top Consumer Goods and Retail Supply Chains for 2009

We all heard a lot about JDA becoming a leader in supply chain. Here is a link to an interesting article on the other end of the spectrum i.e. the businesses who are actually using such supply chain/retail products. The article ranks the companies worldwide who are leading in supply chain management (for year 2009) and what are they looking for while pursuing a better supply chain.

Here is the link......http://www.retailwire.com/Discussions/Sngl_Discussion.cfm/14304? (if asked for registration, it is free).

Planning budget allocation for the next season?

I was just curious when sales budget is planned for the next season how is the budget proportionately allocated between full price sales and markdown sales? Is it based on past sales data for a similar product or is it just an industry average the retailers follow? And what other data a planner/category manager looks at for a pre-season planning?

It would be interesting to know how pre-season planning is done when most of the time only information a planner would have is past seasons' sales data. If our pre-season plan is off by a large number then it would be a lot of in-season corrections for the planner! Let me know what you guys think.

Analytical Retailing

Recently there was an article about how retailers are using computing powers to study how consumer behavior as well economics can be used to study as well as affect customer shopping. The article further talks about analytical software being used to understand consumer patterns. It talks about how web applications are playing a role in consumer choices for shopping; so we can say power is shifting more from retailer to the consumers. The article further states and I quote "The company also uses analytics software to optimize operations — including marketing, shipping, distribution and manufacturing." To add a bit retailers are also realizing importance of demand based pricing optimization which is the heart of pricing suite of products for JDA. Of course the article is US retailing-centric but these changes would happen in India as organized retail grows. Here is a link to the article.........http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/business/03unboxed.html?ref=business

Batch Management in Retail Stores

Grocery Retailers in India are finding it challenging in handling batch numbers for the SKU's they carry in their stores. As the volume of business increases, the count of stores and the count of SKUs, the retailer handles are also increasing tremendously. Retailers are finding it hard to control the shelf life of a SKU kept on the shelf. Since the FIFO process in the store is quiet manual, the task of following the queuing procedure for batch numbers has left to the mercy of the store personnel. Being spent a quality amount of my tenure in Retail, I really get furious when I find an expiry stock still lying on the shelf.

During my last store visit, i picked up a Maggi Masala Noodles and proceeded towards billing. Being a retailer myself, I have turned the pack to look into the manufacturing date of the product( Old habits die-hard!!!). I was shocked to see that the product i am carrying is already expired 15 days back.Being such a fast moving product, I would have never expected Maggi Noodles to be expired and still lying on the shelf. Having shopped in such a store, I would never want to revisit that store in my life time.