Perfecting the customer’s last mile delivery experience can be achieved by reducing logistics complexity and increasing efficiency, while controlling costs.
Retail
Retail including online, brick and mortar–promotion, pricing, demand, logistics, procurement, supply chain, returns, etc.
Freshness Wars — Part One: Freshness, the Foundation of Competitiveness in Grocery
The quality of fresh food is the prime determinant of where consumers decide to shop for their groceries. Here we discuss why that is so and the role of freshness in competition for grocery market share.
Last Mile Delivery Excellence – Part One: Perfecting the Customer’s Experience
Customers’ expectations for delivery excellence continue to climb for faster, error-free delivery, more granular visibility, more convenience, and increased flexibility. Here we discuss specific strategies and capabilities that leading companies are using to try and perfect the customer’s delivery experience, such as via hyperlocal delivery, dynamic dispatch and routing, adaptable workflows, dwell time reduction, real-time visibility, expanding the range of delivery windows, locations, and options, sustainable delivery, last minute rescheduling, and more
Retails’ Climate Change Responsibility – Part Two: Diverse Strategies for Rapidly Reducing Transportation Emissions
We examine strategies and techniques for making near-term reductions to carbon emissions from transportation, such as improving driving behavior and vehicle performance, minimizing and optimizing returns, increasing first-attempt delivery rates, consolidation and mix-mode strategies, integrating private fleet with purchased transportation, and forecast accuracy and inventory optimization for hyperlocal distribution.
Retails’ Climate Change Responsibility – Part One: Reducing Near-term Emissions by Continuous Optimization
The pressure for retailers to lower their carbon emissions dramatically and swiftly has never been greater. Here we explore strategies and tactics for near-term rapid reduction in transportation-related emissions that can be realized in under 12 months, starting with continuous optimization.
Agile Demand-Supply Alignment – Part 3G: Solution Assessments
Here we assess Mercado’s supply chain network/platform for connecting retailers with suppliers, forwarders and brokers, carriers, and other service providers in the order-to-delivery process for imports. We also cover Zencargo’s solution for mid-sized retailers who are doing significant importing and seek control tower capabilities combined with freight forwarding services.
Agile Demand-Supply Alignment – Part 3E: Solution Assessments
We assess Infor Nexus, an end-to-end multi-party networked platform for global trade, with visibility throughout the purchase-to-pay process.
Agile Demand-Supply Alignment – Part 3D
An assessment of IBM Sterling’s Inventory Control Tower solution for global supply chains with critical inventory needs—especially healthcare providers, grocery retailers, and spare parts dealers. We also look at Elementum, provider of incident management for companies with large complex supply chains where many issues arise requiring multi-party collaboration.
Analytics Advantage – Part 3A
Analytics can be used to improve carrier performance, enabling data-driven negotiations, improving delivery performance, reliability, responsiveness, and information sharing.
Optimizing the Customer Experience with Exceptional Home Delivery
This report goes into the depths of how to achieve exceptional and profitable home delivery using continuous optimization.
Infrastructure Is the Starting Point
Retail and Supply Chain with warehouse fulfillment, service management, and manufacturing are going through a vast make-over. Why?
We need the data. And we need it now. It’s great to talk about IoT, but you need the infrastructure in place to collect that data. And that can be expensive—really expensive. Therefore, we need a range of solutions appropriate for each facility and pocketbook.