Technology In Retail Supply Chain

Technology has played an important role in the retail market and especially in the supply chain to bring improvements in transparency and efficiencies.  This use of technology has been so important that today the supply chain has become dependant on the technology and these same practices in technology are being imported to the retail market practice supporting consumer shopping and purchasing.  In fact, while the retail market is the reason for these improvements in the supply chain, the reality is that the supply chain has truly lead the way in technology and capabilities to support the retail omni market and as a result the supply chain practice of integrating and leveraging technology to support market demands more efficiently and transparently.  The supply chain method for continuous improvement along with the capabilities to identify, integrate and leverage technology must continue to be expanded into the retail market in order to support consumer demands.

Technology is not necessarily the answer to all the retail marketplace challenges, instead I believe the practices designed and defined by the supply chain leaders will allow retailers to more efficiently support the consumer demands on shopping and purchasing.  I believe these engineered-based supply chain practices provide the foundation for retailers to sense and respond to changing demands of the consumer and the changing demands and capabilities of their supply chain partners.Technology provides the tools that can be utilized by the retail marketplace and supply chain from the supplier to the consumers to support the demands and expansion of the markets and supply chain supporting these markets.  

All of the technology and capabilities though does no good at all if there is not a repeatable process in place that first identifies the problem and this is where the continuous improvement process comes into play.  A robust and transparent continuous improvement program has really been a key contributing factor to the improvements in capabilities and transparency in the supply chain and these same benefits can be realized by the supply chain.  The challenge for retailers though is the culture that generally waits for the improvements to be proven by the market and others in this market, the vast majority of retailers are followers and this will be come a leading contributor to their struggle to simply maintain in the developing retail marketplace.

This puts the large legacy retailers in a bit of a conundrum because they have traditionally played a follow-the-leader strategy in technology implementation and integration.  This has been fed in large part because of the cost to implement technology in a large brick and mortar network of stores. This can no longer be accepted in the retail omni marketplace because of Amazon, basically.  Retailers must embrace the continuous improvement model as a means to integrate technology improvements to react to the market demands. Retailers no longer have the luxury of waiting for someone else to define and implement technologies to prove out the model because as soon as one improvement is implemented the continuous improvement model calls for validation and identification of the next improvement.  In other words, retailers can no longer afford to wait and implement major changes to their model because of the velocity of change in the market.