Managing your vendors effectively
Contributed by Charu Gupta, Knowledge Buddy
All retailers, whether big or small, have to manage their vendor base efficiently. Larger the number of brands, bigger is the vendor base. Retailers know that to stay ahead in race they have to obtain right merchandise at right quantity and at right prices and make it available to the customers on time.
Vendor Management is a process that allows the retailers to take advantage of ideas, innovation, best practices and cost benefits which the industry offers. A retailer needs to do excessive amount of detailing and documention of each and every process associated with each vendor. He has to define clear guidelines pertaining to shipments, quality controls, pricing, markdowns, logos and promotions, etc. along with the vendors. Proper Service Level Agreements (SLAs) have to be signed with each vendor to keep a record of written agreement with them .
Supply Chain Management in Consumer Goods - An In-Depth Look
The White Paper talks about the story of a packet of ‘Star Glucose Biscuits’ in ‘SuperMart’ on FC Road in Pune, from the point of view of Supply Chain Management. The Supply Chain model of Star Biscuits, Forecasting demand and determining stock levels, dealing with the drastic changes, etc. have been talked about in detail in this paper.
Cost Reduction in Supply Chain for Retailers
Contributed by Charu Gupta
Today, retailers having chain stores and numerous distributors face a big challenge of giving best services to their customers and making timely delivery of products. This problem can only be solved once a retailer’s supply chain is responsive enough to meet the consumer’s growing demand.
A retailer needs to strike a balance between maintaining a high level of service along with low costs. As the retailers have spread their wings globally using multi-channels and have also ventured into new categories, the supply chains have become much more complex and hard to handle.
