Earning customer loyalty over and over again, streamlining ordering process, reducing spoilage, maximizing profit, serving fresh food, and bettering vendor management are few key areas multi-chain fresh departments like to focus on. But, in the meantime, grocers have to deal with the day-to-day challenges of doing business like balancing customer demands, unexpected transit delays, predicting demand volatility, over-stock situations, and other common challenges.
For example, you may sometimes find excess of stock in hand while other times a shortage of important stocks. In another scenario, your workforce may get occupied with heaps of manual counting, balancing records and data entry which hampers productivity and makes the entire supply chain process cumbersome, error-prone and weary.
Similarly, without an agile and resilient supply chain, it may be really challenging for super-store managers to calculate, analyze, and oversee inventory and orders. They may find themselves in a dilemma, wondering which specific store has generated orders of specific fresh bakery items? Or Which particular fresh department has shown interest on same bakery items, but of different quantities? Which vendor will cater to the need of high-end fresh proteins (meat, seafood, poultry, etc.) timely and cost-effectively? Or How can they consolidate, examine, analyze, verify, dismiss and approve all orders in a go, considering all the facts and insights they have?
So what can and should, grocers do to ensure their fresh inventory ordering practices are streamlined and organized? How can grocers ensure which sub categories and SKUs should always be in stock at which hours of the day? How can they ascertain which fresh-food items may require twice-daily deliveries, so that the store won’t run out of those items before the end of the day?
Going Digital Is the Answer
Considering the multifaceted and dynamic fresh-food industry, the multi-store inventory needs today cannot be adequately managed through spreadsheet or paper work. Yet, despite the known benefits of mobilizing and digitizing your fresh department, spreadsheet is still widely used in grocery stores. However, there are many challenges associated with spreadsheets – scalability issues, lack of instant ordering features, time consumption and tediousness in managing, tracking and analyzing orders of hundreds or even thousands of stores at different locations.
Road to an Agile Supply Chain
The ad hoc legacy system, spreadsheet and tools of the past, won’t likely do in today’s world.
In a multi-chain fresh department, there would be several stores in various districts, having regional and divisional managers. They need a system that can resolve their issues promptly. A system that is agile and gives complete insight of active, pending and completed orders on the go. An application that can save time in ordering inventories and allow more time in high-priority tasks. Or, a software that allows great transparency and foster greater collaboration with vendors and helps keep a tab on market demand and supply fluctuations.
Getting Started and Executing
With the new capabilities of intelligent forecasting, demand sensing and other robust features in a modernized and digitized system, you can achieve new levels of understanding of what’s happening in your multi-chain fresh departments in real- time. It includes an insight of daily consumption, point of sale, market factors, and customer behavior by segment and geography, enabling you and other decision-makers to act more quickly, smartly and with greater flexibility.
It’s time to re-examine your fresh inventory ordering practices at store level with time, investment, and sustained top-management attention. Turn your supply chain into a powerful source of competitive advantage. Analyze how you can empower your sales team to make demand smooth and predictable. Track, analyze, and approve fresh department order requests from multiple stores in a centralized way. And, meet the expected delivery schedules of multiple stores timely.
Are you finding a challenge to manage inventory orders from multiple stores in one place?
Find out how we can help transform your fresh inventory ordering practices and digitize your fresh departments for best operational set of decisions, higher margins and increased revenue growth. Schedule a Free Demo to know how we can automate your fresh department to increase operational efficiency and reduce cost.
Shashin Shah has been an expert in the Information technology field for more than twenty years. His experience globally and in the US, spanning across several industries has greatly contributed to his unparalleled skill set. Currently, Shashin is working as Chief Business Officer at DTES division of Happiest Minds, where he is primarily handling Pimcore Global Services. Pimcore is 100% open source consolidated platform for PIM, MDM, DAM, WCM & Ecommerce.
