When recession hit the market, the impact on CPG industry was inevitable. With customers trying to save every penny possible, the competition in market for providing best quality product at minimal price possible has surpassed all previous levels. Everyone is trying to get the most of every dollar they spend. Few most common CPG industry specific issues can be easily listed as:
- Lost sales due to out of stock conditions
- High inventory carrying cost due of misplaced stocking
- Promotion expenses going in vain
- Loss of margins due of expedition costs
- Increasing IT Complexity
Circumstances like this call for nothing but best in class, efficient and optimized business processes which are driven by one and only goal, increasing the profitable revenue making.
The road to accomplish this target is anything but smooth, need is to ensure that the supply chain backbone transforms into an efficient value chain. The value shall be visible and transparent to every stakeholder, be it an internal department(e.g. sales, marketing, operations) or an external vendor. With growing capabilities at retailer's end to capture demand at the point of it's origin, need is to build processes to capture this demand data and utilize it to drive the supply chain. Problem in gathering and utilizing this information is variety of retailer's POS capturing systems, standards and granularity.
One of the AMR Research paper clearly outlines this fact by saying "The Bottom Line: Consumer products manufacturers must centrally manage all demand signal data, including POS, to create a Demand-Driven Supply Network (DDSN) that improves demand visibility to reduce stockouts by more than half and increase Perfect Order performance by 17%"
While in today's generation of supply chain, availability of data is lowest of concerns, problem is with managing this high volume and ensuring the accurate required information is made available to upstream for planning. With variety of sources of POS data, the need to capture and cleanse it prior to it's availability for being used in planning is of high importance.
Oracle's Demand Signal Repository product has shown thought leadership in this direction, by providing a collaborative demand signal management platform with best of breed functionality and reporting capabilities.
Oracle's DSR datasheet points out it's three key capabilities:
- Capture and manage large volumes of disparate external demand data
- Analyze, report and take action based on Day/SKU/Store level insights
- Integrate clean, harmonized demand data to external applications
DSR empowers you to:
- Greater visibility of data to better sense, shape and respond to demand
- Reduce manual effort and cost
- Simplify collaboration across teams and applications.
(Read more about DSR@ http://www.oracle.com/ocom/groups/public/@ocompublic/documents/webcontent/018927.pdf
