Flexible and cost-efficient procurement
It’s a rough battle…
… for clients in the sporting goods industry. Between ever-decreasing prices and unpredictable weather, flexible and cost-efficient procurement of goods has evolved into a decisive competitive factor.
The sporting goods industry is unlike any other in terms of special offers, end-of-season sales and store openings, which translates into constantly fluctuating prices, orders, deliveries and inventory. In order for sporting goods stores to stay ahead of the game and remain competitive, they need to be fast – very fast! This also applies to their supply chain processes. Currently, in real time is the fastest possible way orders can be placed. That is why an increasing number of businesses are turning to Electronic Data Interchange, or EDI, to pave the way for efficient and, above anything, more flexible supply chain processes. There are myriad benefits, including shorter delivery times, faster response to changing demands, meeting manufacturing demand, saving on storage costs, decreasing or even eliminating manual process steps and many more.
Seasonal business is a challenge
Almost the entire order process had previously been done manually. In light of the highly seasonal nature of the sporting goods business, article master data had to be compared each and every time when pre-ordering for the season. Even though most businesses rely on Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP), they avoided automated orders, exchanging paper orders instead – which meant that all data had to be entered into the ERP in a tedious manual process.
The solution: Never out of stock
This has changed due to the ever-increasing share of articles that are constantly available at stores, called “never out of stock“ articles. Large sporting goods retailers increasingly rely on automated procurement of goods processes, which help advance the entire industry.
EDITEL supports sporting goods stores of any size with the optimization of their procurement of goods processes with EDI and with the implementation process. We look forward to hearing from you!
