Benchmarking supply chain management
behind the veil of long but archaic experience,” informs Jaswal.
“Further, apparel is theft prone. Not many companies are there who give theft-proof distribution services in India. They will deliver short and would be very quick in giving a ‘certificate of facts’ for claiming insurance,” he continued.
“If we get the right support from these external parties, such as customs, ground handler, airline, shipping line, customer, etc we can achieve much more efficiency than what is existing,” Vohra points.
“The way to manage uncertainty in fashion business is to improve the quality of the forecasting. Hence, there is a need to reduce the reliance that organisations place on forecasting, and focus on reducing lead-times,” notes Subrmanian.
Khosla opines,” The fashion industry has very short product life cycles and unpredictable demand and long and inflexible supply processes. These characteristics make the industry a suitable avenue for efficient supply chain management practices. Practices experienced in the conventional management of the supply chain raised the need of to a new prototype supply chain management.” KGGRKPI
Considering the nature of business and the challenges forwarders face to maintain the availability and reliability of trend-driven apparel market, it is necessary to understand what is needed to keep up with the rapidly-evolving world of the multichannel retail marketplace? Katyal says, “Fastest deliveries and organised inventory management are needed factors to match the speed.”
According to Jaswal, fashion brands need to partner with reliable logistics companies that offer technology embedded solutions to help manage flexibility and tackle the increasingly complex fashion environment by avoiding delays and providing precise tracking.
“In a typical multi-retailer environment, such as an airport, shopping mall or urban shopping center, inbound goods are delivered by numerous suppliers to each store, small quantities. This means colossal inefficiencies and multiplication of effort, as well as large amounts of avoidable noise, pollution and inconvenience to the local population. What is needed is a consolidation platform, located close to the airport, shopping mall or urban shopping center. All deliveries then can be routed via the consolidation platform, significantly reducing the amount of inbound delivery traffic, leaving retailers free to focus on what they do best,” notifies Subramanian. in
Vohra believes that in order to be up-to-date with the rapid evolution of the retail marketplace one must rapidly evolve, as well as, innovate one’s own service offering to this industry. Just maintaining consistent service levels or lower rate levels is not enough in today’s time.
It is necessary to go a step further and assist our customers, overseas partners, local clearance teams, with whatever issues they may be facing.
“We believe in often conducting focus groups that will allow better discussions and hence, if problems are brought up, our focus is always to resolve them immediately. This creates room for a positive outlook as opposed to a certain redundancy which hampers development in this vertical. A constant reliability is the best gap that can be filled in any rapidly evolving scenario,” opines Vohra.
“With increased marketing channels, outsourcing options and fashions changing not only from season to season but also within the same season, it is important for retailers to invest in creating a flexible and responsive supply chain.,” adds Khosla.