Lean retailing e as implicações a montante

Continuado daqui:
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"To make a sale, a retailer must have "on its wagon" the product the customer wants. Absence of an item often translates into a lost sale and reduced revenues and profits. The magnitude of such lost sales for retailers can be significant. For example, in 1994, roughly 25 percent of customers who entered a Macy's store left without making a purchase because the product they were seeking was not available. On the other hand, the retail "wagon" should not be too full, since stocking retail shelves with unpopular items also results in excess costs—the cost of capital tied up in unwanted goods, the opportunity cost of the space that could be used for products that customers would buy if present, and, ultimately, lost margin when retailers must resort to price markdowns or product disposal to clear languishing items from their shelves.
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The main goal of retail inventory strategy is to maximize profitability by managing the inherent tension between stocking too much and stocking too little.
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But as product variety has increased and product life cycles have shortened, this tension has become increasingly acute, prompting inventory management practices to evolve in recent years to meet rapidly changing market demands."
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"Conceptually, retail inventory management is straightforward enough: Forecast demand for a product; order the product in the appropriate quantity; stock it in the right retail locations; keep track of its sales and the resulting inventory levels; and replenish its store inventories if possible (either from the manufacturer if it offers replenishment services for that product or from the retailer's central warehouse if the retailer had purchased a large quantity of the product in advance of the selling season). In practice, however, retail inventory management is fraught with challenges, such as long and uncertain order-fulfillment lead times, and errors in product identification and record keeping."
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O livro segue com várias abordagens sobre a produção de previsões, com os vários riscos de se fazerem previsões com base em modelos, ou seja, simplificações da realidade.
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"The forecasting challenges retailers confront have been amplified in recent years by product proliferation in almost every category. As a result, demand forecast uncertainty has grown substantially, thereby increasing the level of inventory that must be held to meet customer service requirements. High demand uncertainty, previously associated only with fashion products, is now pervasive, characterizing even those items once regarded as basics—such as power tools, industrial seals, men's dress shirts, and blue jeans.
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product variety is costly due to the increased demand uncertainty associated with each unit. Retailers thus must either limit product variety or change their way of doing business so as to minimize the impact of high variety. Lean retailing is the major such change that retailers are adopting to reduce significantly the costs associated with product variety."
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Assim, os autores encaminham-se para uma nova forma de trabalhar:
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"The new world of rapid replenishment implies additional capabilities for both the retailer and manufacturer. The retailer must be able to gather and synthesize point-of-sales data quickly to determine what has sold and then update its demand forecast for the product accordingly.
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The manufacturer must deliver the ordered product quickly to the retailer. As we describe in Chapter 7, manufacturers have essentially two choices in supplying replenishables. They can hold finished products in inventory, thereby reducing their processing requirements during the replenishment lead time to picking, packing, and shipping the order. However, this approach increases the risk to the manufacturer: It has to commit to holding finished goods of a product for which it has little or no consumer demand information.
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The alternative is to adopt quick-response manufacturing strategies that allow items to be produced to order. But given the increasingly short lead times dictated by retailers (often just a couple of days), most manufacturers cannot produce in this way. Therefore, it is not surprising that most replenishment products are basics or fashion-basics with relatively stable demand: Manufacturers are unwilling to hold speculative stock to meet replenishment requests from retailers for fashion products because the risk of holding those fashion goods in finished goods inventory is too high.
Ironically, replenishment capabilities would be of most value to the retailer for fashion products, but because of their short product lives and the unpredictability of demand, fashion products are typically not offered on a replenishment basis. From the apparel supplier's perspective, that's a good thing—at least for the time being."
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Esta é uma das razões para o regresso dos clientes no têxtil.
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Continua.
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Trechos retirados de "A stitch in time : lean retailing and the transformation of manufacturing—lessons from the apparel and textile industries"