PROMISE FULFILLED

Front-end omnichannel success relies on back-end fulfillment

The front-end promise of omnichannel retail cannot be delivered without investment in back-end technology and processes that allow fulfillment of orders across multiple channels. Retailers must eliminate internal silos and obtain real-time awareness of their full inventory.

Omnichannel fulfillment is a difficult, but not impossible, task. Here are a few examples of retailers that are working to provide the goods customers want, when and where they want them:    

Whole Foods: In a Valentine’s Day promotion, Whole Foods Market and the Instacart delivery service offered flowers delivered in as little as one hour across 15 major U.S. metros.

Customers could log into the Instacart site or mobile app and choose from three bouquet options, then use the “notes” feature to specify their preferred color and what they would like to say on a handwritten card. Customers also chose a delivery window and could place orders up to five days in advance.

In addition to ordering flowers, customers could use Instacart’s Valentine’s Day “aisle” to find chocolates, specialty cheeses, lotions or other romantic items, all curated by Whole Foods Market experts and available for delivery with the bouquet.

Lids: Lids Sports Group has implemented the Micros Locate inventory visibility solution to enable full inventory access at stores. Lids uses the tool for order brokering, providing visibility of inventory to other stores and DCs both from the store as well as to customers using one of Lids’ e-commerce sites. Store associates are equipped with tablets, allowing them “endless aisle” inventory access, and out-of-stock items can be ordered for home shipment at the POS, either from a DC or a nearby store.

Lids takes steps to protect inventory levels, including setting a limit on how many items can be filled from a specific store’s inventory and setting a hierarchy so that goods are first fulfilled from a DC before being fulfilled from a store. Lids also avoids shipping fragile items from stores.

In the 800 stores where Locate has been implemented, Lids has seen a 1.5% sales lift. However, the retailer has stopped using Locate in certain stores where it did not fit well with store operations.

In addition, e-commerce sales have increased much more dramatically since Lids went live with Locate in February 2015.

Bruneau: French office supply retailer Bruneau has selected the Symphony EYC G.O.L.D. unified retail platform to optimize its supplier and inventory performance. Bruneau plans to deploy G.O.L.D. master data management, merchandise management, supply chain management and warehouse replenishment.

Bruneau carries more than 15,000 SKUs across its six French distribution centers and fulfills 25,000 online orders a day for almost 1 million customers in France, Belgium, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands. The Symphony EYC G.O.L.D. deployment will enable Bruneau to achieve complete and accurate visibility of item, inventory and merchandise flows for multiple warehouses and customers; optimize vendor negotiations and purchase conditions within one unified platform; and simplify operations and inventory for multi-country business-to-business e-commerce.

The three retailers reviewed above are taking different approaches to omnichannel fulfillment. Lids is using a centralized “order broker” model, while Whole Foods is partnering with a third-party social platform and Bruneau is deploying an enterprise data management strategy.

However, the underlying goal is the same: making as much inventory as possible readily available for efficient fulfillment of customer orders. With so many options available to customers with a click or a tap, this is the only goal that really matters.