Faced with increased competition and reduced margins, many retailers are focusing on supply chain efficiency to improve inventory visibility and reduce out of stocks. Real-time Stock Management is designed to deliver both.

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Fabrice Goffinet, SAP Project Manager, Carrefour Belgium

The Drivers behind Real-time Stock Management and VMI

Real-time Stock Management projects are often driven by the following business initiatives:

• Business Expansion often through M&A
• Operational cost reduction
• Removal of Supply Chain inefficiencies
• Support for real-time Supply Chain collaborations
• Increased Product Availability
• Reduced Stock Levels
• Must meet contracted in-stock levels through vendor managed replenishment
• Increased Speed of change of product items and customer behavior

The SeeBeyond Approach to Real-time Stock Management and VMI

The key aspects of Real-time Stock Management best practice are to:

• Integrate existing systems in the short term
• Put in place a plan to rationalize systems over time
• Expose and orchestrate sub-processes from different applications to create new end-to-end business processes.
• Transition gradually to common systems, driven by business objectives, organizational patterns and projects
• Re-orchestrate transaction and data flows to support the transition

The SeeBeyond Return on Investment in Real-time Stock Management and VMI

SeeBeyond solutions enable Real-time Stock Management in a cost effective way by leveraging existing IT investments. The benefits to the business are:

• Consistent user interface for data entry
• Consistent processes for managing stock, regardless of location
• Consistent product data
• Reduced time-to-market through rapid delivery of new composite applications that leverage existing IT investments

The SeeBeyond Solution

The SeeBeyond Integrated Composite Application Network (ICAN) Suite 5 solution supports Real-time Stock Management through the integration and orchestration of an organization’s existing supply chain systems, adding additional functionality as required