Читать книгу Supply Chain Management Best Practices - David Blanchard - Страница 20

There is a defining moment of truth for every customer who enters a retail store, and it comes when the customer selects a specific product for purchase. If there is one thing retailers and their consumer packaged goods (CPG) suppliers fear more than anything else, it's the dreaded empty shelf. When you consider that the out-of-stock rate for retailers averages around 10%, there's a lot of money not being spent by frustrated consumers.

When Procter & Gamble Co. formed its Consumer-Driven Supply Network, it set some lofty goals for its supply chain transformation efforts: reduce inventory by 50%, trim out-of-stocks by 50%, and achieve 20% savings in logistics costs. Reaching those goals required addressing such key areas as product availability, shelf quality, and on-time delivery.

“Time is money—the longer and slower the supply chain, the more costly it is,” explains consultant Patrick Arlequeeuw, formerly P&G's vice president, global business services. “When you take time and cost out of the supply network, you increase flexibility and responsiveness.” Instead of a long, slow chain from raw materials to the finished product on the shelf, P&G set out to create a network of suppliers, manufacturers, and retailers that would facilitate real-time information flow between all these partners, starting with what's happening at the shelf, he says.⁷

What that means is that P&G moved from the traditional CPG model of producing to a forecast to producing according to demand, with the goal of replenishing products as soon as they're purchased. Part of that strategy depends on technology that can receive point-of-sale data from the retailer and convert it into a replenishment order. For instance, P&G synchronizes item data with key retail customers, which helps eliminate unnecessary transcription work while reducing out-of-stocks.

Equally important to that strategy is having an idea of what consumers want even before they enter the store. To that end, P&G regularly surveys its end consumers and works directly with its retailer customers to continuously improve its service levels. The Consumer-Driven Supply Network is “based on a vision of using a consumer purchase to trigger real-time information movement throughout the supply network,” explains Arlequeeuw. “This requires a fundamental change in how supply networks are designed. It means looking at the supply system from the shelf back and determining what is required to deliver the desired consumer experience.” By focusing on its supply chain strategy, P&G has been able to drive consumer needs deeper into the supply network, while increasing its responsiveness and flexibility.

Digital transformation is one of the current buzzwords of the 2020s, but P&G's interest and investment in transformational supply chain technologies dates back many decades. The company, for instance, helped pioneer the development of the electronic product code back in the 1990s, an important milestone along the road to the emergence of radio frequency identification (RFID) as a business-oriented solution. In more recent years, P&G has launched initiatives involving such technologies as the Internet of Things, robotics, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence.

As Bob Herzog, P&G's senior director of planning, points out, “The commercial leadership of our company recognizes that the digital transformation we have in supply chain planning is a competitive advantage.” The company's North American supply chain group is responsible for 16,000 SKUs, 45,000 orders planned per day, and 2,800 vehicles shipped out every day, and the group oversees a supply network of 30 manufacturing plants and 1,200 suppliers. Using concurrent planning, an AI-based technique that synchronizes schedules and events across organizational departments and throughout the supply chain, allows P&G's planners to run scenarios for their product lines several times a day.

“By knowing what's happening sooner and responding faster to it, it allows us to do in just minutes, or at most in a few hours, what used to take us multiple days to do,” Herzog explains. “We can respond to customer requests on the spot, taking time out of the supply chain and winning at the moment of truth for our partners.”⁸