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CAPABILITY

Retail: Supply chain management services

Accenture helps retailers build seamless supply chain operations through vendor collaboration, inventory planning, flexible fulfillment and integrated merchandising across channels.

Overview

The supply chain is a critical component of retail organizations, enabling the delivery of the right products to customers, at speed. Being seamless, dynamic and agile across all channels and at every node of the supply chain can help retailers optimize product availability and increase profitability.

Retailers need to evolve their supply chain to holistically manage inventory at the enterprise level, with real-time visibility, dynamic fulfillment and returns management to achieve seamless retailing. Additionally, customer-facing employees should be trained and have these skills, in the stores, at distribution centers and in call centers.

Why Accenture

We help retailers create a seamless supply chain model, built on a combination of fast innovation, integrated planning and agile, best-practice supply chain management capabilities.

To win in what is arguably the toughest environment the industry has ever faced, retailers need to sharpen their ability to innovate, offer product assortment and exceptional services that stand out from the crowd—faster and more efficiently than their competitors.

Accenture’s supply chain management services help accelerate our clients’ performance by focusing on being right, being fast and being efficient.

Being right

  • Customer-led insights: Harnessing customer insights to enable retailers to create better products, leading to higher margins.

  • Culture of fast innovation: Accelerating concept-to-shelf time and shifting the way retailers approach product innovation.

  • Partner network enabled: Forging innovative arrangements with network partners to collaborate on more differentiated products.

Being fast

  • Repeatable platforms: Finding synergies—from product to product and season to season—for faster, more flexible production.

  • Integrated planning: Combining plans that connect each stage of the product value chain—from merchandising to assortment to replenishment.

  • Multichannel supply chain: Developing a multichannel supply chain backed by a dynamic order management system, allowing cost-effective fulfillment across channels.

Being efficient

  • End-to-end awareness: Driving awareness and implications of key decisions that may lead to inefficiencies across the value chain.

  • Results-oriented culture: Minimizing approval layers, accelerating decision making, avoiding excessive meetings and ensuring that true decision-making power is not aggregated at very low or high levels.

  • Lean execution: Avoiding poorly connected processes, information gaps and operational silos that create waste, lead to rework and contribute to suboptimal cost structures.

Specific Services

Differentiated, high-demand products do not add to profit margins if the products are introduced a season too late. Speeding the right products to market requires strong capabilities in these key areas: repeatable platforms and agile, multichannel supply chains.

Specific services offered by Accenture include:

  • Integrated planning

  • Vendor collaboration

  • Private label strategy

  • Multichannel fulfillment

  • Indirect procurement

Retailers that can develop the right products and services, right now, still have to be efficient and deliver the value proposition that consumers demand and the profitability that investors expect.

Featured Content:

  • Achieving High Performance through Improved Retail Supply Chain Planning

  • Next-Generation Collaboration: The New Frontier for Shopper Value and Industry Growth

  • The Waiting is Over: Why Retailers Have to Get Better at Private Label Now