Best Tips for practical retail supply chain.

As merchants and buyers continue to take on more and more responsibility for product concepts, their development, and margin potential, it's important to understand what best practices get those products to market. There's art and science to getting the right product to the right store at the right time and at the right price point. At TradeStone, we provide the infrastructure for both the design and development. The right product hinges upon the buyer's decision: what items will I source, what are its attributes, and where will I find it.
In essence, this is what TradeStone calls the Unified Buying Process. This means that it should be just as easy to source flip flops, mp3 players, or drumsticks from 6,000 miles away as it would be to have them manufactured across the street.
This leads us to the first best practice: evaluate your product portfolio in terms of margin potential. It is a well-known fact that domestically-sourced items carry a mark-up of 45 percentage points. That same item, sourced overseas, can command a mark-up of 65 percentage points. It's easy to see that a strategically weighted portfolio can dramatically increase department and store revenue figures.
Now it has to be easy to share product attributes and specifications and work back and forth on fabrications and colors, quality testing, sampling, and production. With the product constantly evolving, and profitability on the line, it's easy to see that the next best practice has to be the ability to normalize communications and collaboration with vendors. What does this mean? It means that RFQs should be delivered to each supplier adjusted for their language, their currency, their time zone. This means that the supplier can simply respond with the best cost per item they can offer, the best lead time they can offer, and any recommendations for variations. Why is this important? With this apples-to-apples comparison of vendor capabilities, pricing, and lead time, the Buyer can make the best supplier determination based on product profitability.
With the order placed, the next best practice is to establish the production milestones for all the components, quality tests, fit evaluations, and packaging, bringing together all the supply chain stakeholders with exception-based alerting and workflows. With this critical information on their dashboards, designers, merchants, buyers, and factories are able to react quickly to color dips, sampling requests, and the myriad of quality tests.
This true collaboration capability between Buyers and Vendors leads to the next best practice: using the Purchase Order as the central repository for all product refinement and change requests. So often in Retail, the CFO has no visibility into the received orders, the committed-to orders, and the outstanding requests-for-quote. Nor is there any visibility into what quality tests have failed and the where-used ripple effect this has throughout the program. Nor is it always clear when or why quantities changed, transportation modes changed, or attributes changed. These changes can all be captured with true collaboration in the live purchase order document, visible to all supply chain stakeholders. With the order as the central repository, all packing list and customs documentation is kept up-to-date with no need to re-key changes. With the purchase order as the central repository, all planning reports are kept up-to-date with no clerical data entry. With the purchase order as the central repository, all shipment alerts are kept up-to-date with no surprises for warehouses and distribution centers.
By designating the purchase order as central to all transactions, we can achieve our next best practice: C-TPAT compliance. Instead of scrambling for customs notification, digging through HTS codes, and maintaining country quota spreadsheets, TradeStone customers are literally sailing through customs. By maintaining country of origin, value, and product classification in the purchase order, the vendor simply needs to drag and drop line items from the purchase order document to their packing list. This packing list information now feeds data to the commercial and service invoices, all without data entry resources.
And with Tier 3 C-TPAT compliance in check, it's easy to move forward to our next best practice: 10 Plus 2 compliance. As you can see, by simply using the purchase order as the keystone for all transaction data, 10 Plus 2 compliance becomes second nature. The new initiative asks for Manufacturer, Seller, Consolidator, Buyer and Ship to names and addresses, Container stuffing location, Importer and Consignee record numbers, Country of origin of goods and the Commodity Harmonized Tariff Schedule number. The 2 additional data sets are: Vessel Stowage Plan (or BAPLIE), and Container Status Messages filed by the carrier.
These best practices not only ensure that supply chains will be efficient, but also that they will be secure. They will be able to turn on a dime as market testing results come in, quickly switching out colors, fabrications, and attributes. When all is said and done, the ultimate best practice is giving the consumer what they want

Source : ALI (Assosiasi Logistic Indonesia)