Adapting B2B Integration To Support Distributed Commerce
By Peter Edlund, DiCentral
Brick-and-mortar retailers spent decades building infrastructure to guarantee merchandise is on the shelf when customers walk into the store. Unfortunately, store traffic is declining, leaving too much perfectly allocated inventory to get marked down, crushing profitability. To survive, major retailers have shuttered hundreds of underperforming stores. At the same time, they’ve invested in e-Commerce capabilities, supporting the largest growth opportunity for their business.
Today’s distributed commerce environment — with its improved digital shopping technologies and widespread adoption of multiple commerce channels — demands greater supply chain agility to drop-ship merchandise when and where the customer wants it. Now is the time for retailers and their partners to develop the operational backbone to thrive in this environment.
Evolution Of B2B Integration And Collaboration
Distributed commerce requires a different B2B integration strategy, focused directly on customer satisfaction. With a supply chain reconfigured for drop-ship, brands and retailers need a holistic understanding of supply chain operations, supported by automated collaboration, to meet customers’ high expectations for a seamless shopping experience.
Scale B2B Integration To Support Drop-Ship
Retailers have implemented EDI with nearly all of their trading partners while leaving brands, transportation firms, banks and 3PLs free to choose their level of system integration. That’s no longer workable. In a distributed commerce environment, previously large orders for thousands of units have been replaced by individual transactions for each product sold, increasing transaction volume exponentially.
To ensure tighter service levels and reduce the cost of supporting retailers, trading partners need to implement greater integration and automation with their back-end systems. The added investment will not only support drop-ship, it will save time and money by streamlining processes and reducing errors.
Improve Supply Chain Operations With Cloud-based Event Management
Successfully operating a drop-ship environment, where customer satisfaction is determined by collaborative supply chain excellence, puts enormous pressure on every supply chain participant. Unavailable until recently, retailers can utilize cloud-based event management applications to gain greater visibility to supply chain performance to proactively manage service levels and exceptions.
These systems monitor the ever-increasing number of B2B transactions and notify supply chain managers of potential service disruptions. From transactions that don’t get acknowledged to orders that miss their shipment deadline, retailers can use event notification to avoid costly mistakes that lead to dissatisfied customers and lost sales.
Accelerate Supply Chain Collaboration With Big Data
To support drop-ship effectively, retailers need to improve how they share and collaborate with their partners. Supply chains generate a huge amount of data from all of the connections among business partners. For most brands and retailers, this is an untapped resource of rich data. Harnessing supply chain big data using sophisticated analytics is essential to accelerate collaboration and the ability to anticipate problems before they happen.
Aggregating B2B orders and shipments with retail POS and inventory data enables trading partners to gain a clear picture of how various demand signals are influencing supply chain operations. With this insight, brands and retailers can better forecast demand by fulfillment channel and determine drop-ship volume to ensure fast and efficient e-Commerce order fulfillment.
B2B Integration’s New Role In Customer Satisfaction
In their continuing shift to distributed commerce, retailers rely more and more on trading partners to support sales and guarantee customer satisfaction. Amazon has successfully leveraged this model to disrupt the industry. As most retailers race to catch up, B2B integration will play a more important role in their ability to capture more customers and deliver merchandise quickly and efficiently.
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