{"id":80207,"date":"2017-12-18T00:43:07","date_gmt":"2017-12-18T08:43:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.globaltrademag.com\/?p=80207"},"modified":"2017-12-10T08:41:25","modified_gmt":"2017-12-10T16:41:25","slug":"speeding-supply-chain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.globaltrademag.com\/speeding-supply-chain\/","title":{"rendered":"Speeding the Supply Chain"},"content":{"rendered":"
Accelerating the supply chain<\/a><\/span>. It\u2019s a theme often encountered among logisticians and company executives. There is a relationship between speed and efficiency. There\u2019s also the question of providing customers the level of service they demand.<\/p>\n \u201cFor the millennial generation, speed is extremely important,\u201d said Mike Parsley, senior vice president for distribution\u00a0 and logistics at Tailored Brands, a company that own the Jos. A. Bank, Men\u2019s Wearhouse, and Joseph Abboud stores, among others.<\/p>\n The company\u2019s business, as its name suggests, is selling men\u2019s tailored clothing. Most of the product is imported from overseas, including custom-made suits for which customers are measured in stores. Even tailoring for ready-to-wear products involves supply-chain and logistics considerations: besides tailoring in store, the company also operates six national tailoring centers what operate like manufacturing facilities to turn out alterations.<\/p>\n Tailored Brands operates over 1,500 retail stores, 28 company-owned depots, and 225 delivery vehicles. The company employs over 3,000 personnel in its supply chain group.<\/p>\n The company takes a consolidated approach to supply-chain management across its divisions in an effort to promote efficiency, reduce costs, and, above all, accelerate speed to market. The company has an ongoing project to further these goals using data and Teradata<\/a><\/span> technology. Parsley spoke at a Teradata conference earlier this year, as did Scott Collen, a senior business consultant with the tech company.<\/p>\n Tailored Brands\u2019 data problem starts with the fact that it has 22 different systems generating and processing data\u2014everything from order and warehouse management systems, to transportation management, ERP, and various others.<\/p>\n \u201cWe didn\u2019t have consolidated information,\u201d said Parsely. \u201cSometimes a report from one group didn\u2019t match a report from another.\u201d<\/p>\n When the company approached Teradata, it\u00a0 came loaded with 19 different key performance indicators<\/a><\/span> and reporting requirements. \u201cWe first approached the problem with business focused workshops and divided all the requests into six different functional areas,\u201d said Collen. \u201cWe brought business experts to together with representatives of IT.\u201d Some of the 22 systems some came from external providers, so they were included as well.<\/p>\n The workshops focused on discussing the KPIs and quantifying the value of each to organizational goals of inventory visibility and accuracy, supply chain speed, and improved customer service. Then they started to figure out what measurements they really needed to track. That process allowed the 19 KPIs to be whittled down to ten, and those remaining were prioritized. Then it was time to apply technology to business goals.<\/p>\n \u201cWe scoped out the project to approach it with agile sprints,\u201d said Collen. \u201cWith the work that was already done we knew ahead of time knew what capabilities and data we needed so we were ready to deliver value as quickly as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n The first phase of the project focused on distribution, from the time product arrived at DCs all the way to consumption. The second phase analyzed transportation times and costs.<\/p>\n \u201cWe use a regional distribution center concept,\u201d said Parsley. \u201cWe want seasonal products to arrive at stores, whether in Houston or in Baltimore, at the same time. Understanding international and domestic transit times was extremely important for that effort. So was the data on how quickly DCs can get product out the door and into the stores.\u201d<\/p>\n Among the results of the effort, Tailored Brands was able to lower DC processing time by over 50 percent in six months. \u201cIt was a matter of focusing on the required data each step in the process,\u201d said Parley. \u201cThat allowed us to fine tune operations and get product through faster.\u201d<\/p>\n The company also improved DC productivity by three percent. \u201cA lot of this came through visibility of ships at port or product making its way through Customs,\u201d said Parsley. \u201cThis enabled us to do better scheduling of labor.\u201d In the first year of the effort, Tailored Brands improved its revenue, by getting product to stores faster, by a cool one-million dollars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Accelerating the supply chain. It\u2019s a theme often encountered among logisticians and company executives. There is a relationship between speed… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":60,"featured_media":80208,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3826,3987,3855,3850,3993,3995,3829,3830,3831,946,3165,3832,3833],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n