Supply Chain thoughts
1. The challenges in supply chain space in the recent years particularly in Multi Brand Retail where business model completely revolve around effective Supply Chain Solutions.
Demand volatility is the biggest challenge. Demand for essential items grew so much that manufacturers were not able keep up with the demand. Demand is going like viral videos, something becomes famous all of a sudden and retailers are under pressure to supply it fastest to the doors of the consumers. Upstream supply fluctuations, economic downturns, natural disasters, ever changing customer demands will continue to be challenges in multi brand retail.
2. How technology is transforming the Supply chain Canvass during these years of Digital Transformation.
Block chain is bringing more transparency to responsible sourcing. The challenge is every body from manufacturer to consumer need to adopt to it before it becomes common usage.
Grocery delivery strategies from Walmart have included drone partnerships, delivery vehicles, Last mile delivery app JoyRun.
3. How are these challenges being tackled by some of the best organizations in the world.
42 “pop-up” e-commerce fulfillment centers for meeting holiday demand.
network of pop-up sites will ship up to 30 percent of Walmart’s online holiday volume
pickup from anywhere, deliver anywhere. Fastest delivery with least/no-charge to customers. crowd sourcing will be a trend we will see evolve rapidly.
4. What is expected out of Supply Chain Managers of tomorrow to gear up for these changing dynamics.
Thinking of creative ways to solve delivery problems with agility. Leveraging un- organized sector in India will be key. Leverage technology as much as possible. Think simple to solve big.
5. What is the impact of COVID on Supply chain?
Several companies responded in their own way dealing with COVID situation. Walmart took measures to ensure safe employment practices and prioritized customer safety. From employee perspective, checking temperature, mandating mask and enforcing strict hand sanitization rules helped to control the situation. From customers perspective, encouraging curb side pickup, online grocery delivery pick up and limiting store capacity helped. For communities, 100’s of store parking lots are converted as COVID19 testing centers. Hired hundreds of thousands of people to support surge in demand, which eased the unemployment situation. Here are some interesting facts.
- In the initial weeks of the lockdown, Walmart was selling enough rolls of toilet paper every five days for the entire U.S. population to get one roll each
- We were selling in a day what we normally sell in a week. Same with wipes.
- When hand sanitizers ran low, we put aloe vera gel next to bottles of alcohol to make your own hand sanitizer.
- Walmart’s Great Value five-pound bag of flour sold nine weeks of supply in five weeks.
- Over the first month of the pandemic, Walmart customers bought 24 million pounds of weight plates, dumbbells and kettlebells. That’s more than the weight of the Eiffel Tower.
6. what are some public space use cases in supply chain
Analytics and AI decision making (Harvard Walmart case), 9/11 case study, Block chain use case. Mangos from Mx and Meat from China.
8. IoT impact on supply chain?
Where are your trucks, what time they are going to deliver and who is going to receive at store and replenish. What conditions these goods need to be maintained, refrigerator ? freezer ?
9. Best practices in supply chain
Supply chain is all about Procurement, logistics, distribution and inventory management. Wal-Mart was the first retailer that experimented central database, store-level point-of-sale systems and satellite network in the mid-1980s.
10. Challenges in supply chain ?
Supply chain is all about predicting what you need in a year from now. Making space in store for a simple item like banana involves lot of planning and re-organizing the store.
More than 11,000 stores, more than 524 billion dollars revenue, 2.4 million associates, 275 million customer visits per week, 300,000 customer mentions per week in social media, 2.5 peta bytes of data is collected from 1 million customers every week, 3,500+ trucks for transportation.
Reference:
https://corporate.walmart.com/facing-the-outbreak/merchandising
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320239187_Wal-Mart's_Successfully_Integrated_Supply_Chain_and_the_Necessity_of_Establishing_the_Triple-A_supply_Chain_in_the_21st_century
*All the opinions mentioned in this article are my own and from my references mentioned above, they have nothing to do with my employer (Walmart Inc).
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