 Think Global, Act Local: New mantra for Digital Commerce Supply Chain E-commerce and electronic retailers, irrespective of their size and geographical reach, are becoming global local with an increasing shift from one-size-fits-all approach. Thus, in order to create value, it’s necessary that the delivery and supply chain that play a hand in gloves role for this sector need to step up.
Hungry customers sending strong demand signals are pulling brands into new locations and expanding into already existing markets stimulating a debate on how to balance the global versus local buyers. Nonetheless, with an astonishing rise of customers preferring to shop the digital way, companies are pressed for more customisation at every opportunity, more transparent and tailored delivery options within much shorter time span. Inadequate warehouses, poor tracking systems, lack of skilled and reliable workers, and limited cargo options are leaving a dent on the future of e-commerce. Under these circumstances, supply chain flexibility, agility and technological convergence turn out to be critical building blocks for the future of e-commerce driven by the omni-channel paradigm. Logistical capabilities are confronted when unprecedented demand come up during festive seasons and local big buying days, which in turn may hit the bottom line for e-commerce. UPS, for instance, lost nearly $180 million in operating profit due to unexpected peak-season demand patterns. Doing a better job on peak volume and resolving growth bottlenecks has turned out to be tough task even for the e-tail magnets, however, the fruits can be sweeter as Alibaba experienced when they took just two hours to reach $2 billion in sales on Singles Day, and by day’s end, reported sales surpassed $9 billion. The implication is that global e-commerce need to have scale on demand and operate an ultra-tight supply chain as soon as they enter these markets. Shipping from nearby store locations, rather than exclusively from warehouses or fulfilment centres is becoming the norm with the trend of same day or within hours delivery on all days. To gain from this disruption, companies like Amazon has partnered with PS and DPD for Sunday delivery in the US and UK, respectively. The result is an ascending number and dimensions of the warehouses and fulfilment centres, which in turn brings about more operational complexity in order fulfilment and difficulty or inability to coordinate and synchronize creating barriers for end-to-end supply chain processes. Elimination of functional silos needs to be implemented with the help of supply chain and logistics software platforms to incorporate greater convergence and functionality into their systems. This will create completely integrated and streamlined platforms. This will also help in removing wastes from supply chain by reducing the dependency on intermediaries. Though all this sounds feasible for the biggies, for SMEs bringing in such technologies requires huge investments. Anticipatory shipping or crowd sourcing of technology enabled services or third party logistics may bring the world closer to them and translate the benefits from localisation. Putting together a demand-driven supply chain anchored in real time flow of information can be achieved by location-specific and customer-centric services. This will enable digital commerce companies distinguish themselves by recognising the desires, values and behaviours of regional markets, enhancing customer engagement and harnessing the potential that e-commerce and digital retail can bring. Author: Debaleena Debnath Debaleena is a digital media consultant @ speradigital. To know more about our services, click here. Follow us Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter.
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 Today’s F&A outsourcing initiatives differ from those of the past in the breadth of the scope of services being put out to bid and is not restricted to single functions such as payroll or benefits administration, however, the FAO market reaching towards the saturation point sends out a strong signal for stirring up the vendors that they need to increase mastery of more specialised finance and accounting services and expand global offerings.
CFOs are seldom concerned only about cost cutting in the present scenario. Since the economic crisis a few years ago, they are exercising extreme caution to be efficient to balance cost pressures against business outcomes. The traditional FAO model of ‘as is’ used by corporations reaping benefits of lower cost through labour arbitrage, increased core competency focus, and access to talent are no longer sufficient as in the process, the process defects also get transferred in their transition phase. This is where the “partnership model” within transition will help the vendors. By implementing this model, outsourcing companies will be able to transfer the lift off benefit of as much as 10-15% to customers during the transition phase itself. Companies are compelling their vendors to streamline financial processes and reduce cycle times as well as improve quality and accuracy simultaneously – drawing on Lean Six Sigma methodologies can produce systemic and sustainable business process improvement. The underpinning theory for Six Sigma is to identify and reduce variations which will ensure that business processes are standardised, repeatable and reliable for both internal and external customers, while Lean helps to reduce waste and increase value by seeking to remove non-value adding steps in a particular process. The tangible outcomes that outsourcing service providers can achieve through implementation of multiple Six-Sigma projects across F&A processes are:
The broader implications are:
Mature outsourcing providers are therefore being punctilious as well as robust in their approach and re-engineering the entire F&A processes. Author: Debaleena Debnath Debaleena is a digital media consultant @ speradigital. To know more about our services, click here. Follow us Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter. E-tailing (electronic retailing) has revamped shopping experience by transforming it to a ubiquitous anytime activity through digital channels providing an efficient and cost effective customer experience. With global retail e-commerce forecasts showing impressive growth over the next few years within both large and emerging markets, it is indeed necessary that companies revive their supply chain and logistics tactics and management as it is a major e-tailing enabler. In other words, the underlying backbone of e-retail is the supply chain strategy. The concept of supply chain encompasses vertical and horizontal integration with parties involved such as manufacturers, transporters, warehouses, retailers and customers, and functional units like new product development, marketing, distribution, customer service, operations and finance.
According to a research, State of the Retail Supply Chain (SRSC) Report 2015, strategic priorities that retail supply chain executives identified for the current market scenario are :-
For companies to increase the productivity and in turn, leverage this e-tail growth, they have to cater and at times anticipate their customers’ needs in an attempt to lead the competition and simultaneously generate profits. When a customer requirement is triggered and recorded via an order, that very moment the supply chain activities start rolling. Still when companies are looking for cost-saving, customer service often takes the blow as compared to supply chain activities. By having a well planned order processing, invoicing, and product delivery management processes, companies can not only improve customer experience by delivering the right product at the right costs at the right place at right time and in the right condition, but hit the bottom line positively as well. In case of companies running out of stock or urgent delivery demands, inventory control, warehouses and tie-ups with logistic partners are necessary to fulfill the consumers’ needs. For instance, since February 2014, India’s leading e-tailer Flipkart is allowing its logistics arm, eKart Logistics, to deliver competitors’ packages. By having an effective reverse logistics as a customer service practice, companies can satisfy the operational aspects of returns and manage any customer retention issues. The ease with which a customer encounters returns strengthens their long-term relationship with a company. By spending money upfront to develop reverse logistics, companies establish customer service best practices throughout a product's life cycle reduce spending and boost revenue all at the same time. Consequently, customers can drive revenues through advocacy and attract future customers through recommendations which further helps in establishing the brand. The standard of customer service and how successfully a company has implemented the services across the supply chain is therefore directly reflected on the profit margin. With the shift in focus to transform the customer services unit from cost centres to value centre and then to profit centres – companies must make sure that their supply chains are incorporated with the latest technologies, while blending harmoniously with the customer experience strategies. Author: Debaleena Debnath Debaleena is a digital media consultant @ speradigital. To know more about our services, click here. Follow us Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter.  Until recently, data has not been a major headache for energy and utility industry. Considering the complexities of budgets strained by aging assets managed with shrinking workforce in contrast with the investments in new capacity, renewable energy, and the convergence of operational technology (OT) with information technology (IT); combined with increasing regulatory measures and environmental concerns of the industry, it becomes demanding to ensure operational readiness and organisational profitability. Many a times, at the heart of these problems is the inability to use and manage structured and unstructured data that is available to a particular organisation. The advent of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) has increased the level of data collection dramatically. To cite a case, if smart meters were incorporated across the U.S., they would generate five times the data of the current AT&T network.
Enterprise search relates to one such solution which can trespass some of these barricades. Enterprise search has been around for ~67 years as described by the concept of ‘Information Retrieval’ by J.E. Holmstrom in 1948. The main challenge faced by businesses that obstructs effective search is the vocabulary disconnect between the terminology and the inherent ambiguity of terminology in their information. The technology can help in enterprise metadata framework to improve search and address governance requirements, however, the technology needs to be embedded within the organisation starting from the tactical, business process level to the associate level through a combination of people and technologies. Coming to specific issues within this sector, for example, in large cities, the energy distribution network consisting of and managed using underground cables, power grids and transformers demand geo-spatial information in a multitude of forms and format. The field workers who are actually doing the operations need access to this information for maintenance jobs. Coordination of field operations is also critical during highly visible large-scale restoration operations that come under public and regulatory scrutiny and, it might be the case that closest field workers need to be located for immediate and urgent fixes. It shouldn’t strike as surprising if large organizations have over 50 million documents in their formal Electronic Document Management Systems (EDMS) alone. This is where Enterprise search drives the result to retrieve contextualised relevant information from MIS located in documents lying on CMS and link it with geo-spatial search so that a unified list of results in form of documents or links are generated. An aptly summarised view on how Enterprise search can help utilities & energy has been given by one of the leading vendors of the technology, Concept Searching, “Enterprise search is an infrastructure component and the impact of poor search reaches far beyond the retrieval of information. Impacting eDiscovery and litigation support, as well as unauthorised access to confidential information, inaccurate results can increase costs as well as organizational risk. Using multi-term metadata that represent a concept, identifying relevant content during a search effectively removes ambiguity and enables the retrieval of information based on the concepts within, increasing both precision and recall.” In this manner, the energy & utilities sector can unleash the power of data using Enterprise search and utilise it for success to ace the competition. Author: Debaleena Debnath Debaleena is a digital media consultant @ speradigital. To know more about our services, click here. Follow us Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter. Small and medium Enterprises (/Businesses) (SMEs/SMBs) worldwide are driving significant growth in today’s economy and have a cumulative influence on the agility of the marketplace. To keep pace with the current exigent market scenario, SMEs should try to optimise their technological foundation and delivery & operational models. For instance, finance executives looking for new approaches to optimize business performance should start with easy processes and low hanging fruits of the finance & accounting which are not core to the business but are important functions on their own, and in an attempt to save precious little time and resources for everyday activities. One major challenge in F&A is that organisations are trying to drive quality, standardisation and transparency across fragmented processes.
According to a research by the Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT), UK in 2015, SMBs are losing nearly £2.9 billion due to unqualified finance staff which implies there is skills gap which can be easily fulfilled by an external service provider rather than going through a tedious and costly hiring and training process. SMEs need to consider the value they are getting out from outsourcing, rather than just follow the trend or because they just do not want to do it. For SMEs, outsourcing processes would be beneficial when these fall into any of the following three categories:
In addition, the presence of an external, objective and expert vendor can reduce the possibility of fudging of numbers, and thus improve the corporate governance process. Finding the right contractors is not easy for SMBs, nevertheless they should take into account someone who can offer the right value combined with the way the outsourcing arrangement is managed, rather than thinking on the lines of who is the biggest or where the service provider is. However, for both client and vendor to be on the same page, it is essential that they have clearly-defined key responsibility areas (KRAs) and confidentiality agreements. SMEs need to partner with vendors who can achieve automation of time-consuming mundane tasks; leverage data science to provide reliable, predictable and accurate financial information, alongside maintaining transparency over both internal operations and customer preferences. Author: Debaleena Debnath and Suraj Poddar Debaleena is a digital media consultant, and Suraj is the founder and CEO @ speradigital. To know more about our services, click here. Follow us Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter. |
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