Industry Insight

1. The channels and ways in which brands and consumers interact increase; the online and offline convergence intensifies; and the stocks tend to be shared.

Traditional product path of Brands – (Agents) – Stores – Offline Customers and Online Orders – E-Commerce warehouse – Online Consumers are broken up. New, diverse order fulfillment paths appear. For example, more online orders are delivered from stores, or consumers pick up by themselves from the stores, and the goods of offline orders are delivered to consumers’ house by express. These help fashion brands to understand and manage the inventory as one whole, so they can achieve more sales and help consumers to get better and better shopping experience. The omni-channel logistics capabilities of enterprises are profoundly affecting the consumer repurchase.

2. Inventory of each SKU becomes smaller, leading to a more diversified goods flow and more complex document  record types.

Shoes and apparel supply chain is complex, there are not only delivery orders, but also stock transfer between the warehouses, between stores, reverse logistics from store to warehouse, from customer to warehouse and from customer to store. The corresponding upstream systems that generate these documents often differ. Usually, the logistics department should at least face the different formats and different information orders from the warehouse WMS, store POS, e-commerce OMS, etc. They also need to allocate to different carriers timely and reasonably, and then effectively supervise and manage the perfect delivery of these carriers. Afterwards, they need to ensure that carrier invoices are consistent with the original documents and the actual execution, which is extremely difficult to handle manually.

3. Huge amount of shipments, non-standard store operations

The number of replenishment orders, transfer orders and return orders is extremely huge and the stores are geographically dispersed. Rapid staff turnover, who may not always be well trained, leads to unstandardized delivery packaging, lack of reliable weight, non-standard labels, fragmented shipping records. All above make management of transition, exceptions, PODs, lead time and even  carrier billings difficult and obscure.

4. More urgent requirement on lead time

“Time is sales” is a true portrayal of apparel industry, with the rising trend of new retail, omni-channel concept, the logistics lead time requirements of fashion enterprises will be further strengthened. Shorten the transit time of inventory means to increase the effective sales time. Acquiring a tool that effectively monitors, manages and optimizes transit time is an extremely pressing need for many fashion industry logisticians.

5. Large gap between traditional 3PL and express

In the field of 2C logistics, the courier service has basically achieved process standardization, shipment traceability & full digitization. However, during the same period, the large traditional three-party logistics still follow old methods of traditional excel, e-mail, telephone, WeChat and even fax, which open up a huge gap in terms of efficiency, cost and accuracy. The time has come to change it.

6. Consistent pursuit of cost reduction and efficiency increase

As competition intensifies, discounts increase, overall profitability of fashion companies goes down. Logistics costs as another major direct cost under after the cost of raw materials procurement, are given more and more attention by not only the logistics supply chain department, but also by senior management, financial department and procurement department.