To drive retail supply chain efficiency and reduce more margin, retailers must achieve improvements in:
- The amount of control over the process
- The quality of communication between retailer, agencies and manufacturers
- Actionable insights
The priority is to get a better perspective from which to see the process. For a retailer, it’s difficult to gain visibility over the entire private brand development process through the supply chain. It’s even harder to reduce risks and increase your speed to market. But it is possible, and the largest retailers are developing these capabilities.
Gain Visibility
Are review cycle times taking a month? Is there a pattern in the reasons why stakeholders are rejecting artwork or labels? Having the right KPIs can help you see the big picture and avoid time-consuming obstacles. Automatically generated KPIs make it easy for you to see exactly which parts of the process are working and which need to be fine-tuned. Gaining this visibility will drive supply chain efficiency.
Reduce Risk
When so many parties are involved throughout your supply chain, the risk of recall and lawsuits due to labeling errors seemingly looms from all directions. What can private label leaders do to dramatically reduce their number of sleepless nights? Having an automated workflow ensures every decision maker gives appropriate input on product information, artwork, and labels before they are sent to the printer. Powerful tools like online proofing provide a rapid feedback mechanism to concurrently review hi-res files. Giving decision-makers the ability to log on from virtually anywhere and make annotations that are viewable to their colleagues renders the process more efficient, but it’s the ability to examine, modify, and approve everything from die lines, labels, FSIs, video, and other marketing material that makes the approval process much less error-prone.
Accelerate to Market
A key warning sign of inefficiency is getting your products to market late. When you’ve achieved optimal supply chain efficiency, products get to market on time. When you can reduce the amount of time each review cycle takes and you can reduce the number of cycles, your time to market is improved by a multiplying factor. Further, a centralized, self-service Digital Asset Manager can remove the need to spend lots of time searching for, distributing, or reformatting private brand assets into different file types.
Reduce Hard Costs
Did you know, on average, 30% of a company’s digital assets are lost annually? This is another important reason to make the most of a Digital Asset Manager. It gets incredibly expensive to recreate 30% of your private brand assets when they can’t be found at the right time, especially because new assets need to be re-routed through your approval process – further adding to the expense! Also, when you can reduce the number of cycles it takes to get labels and artwork right, this can save you hard costs in agency change fees or overages.
All of these benefits can be achieved, and not with severe threats, fines, or pressure on individuals. Private brand leaders can gain visibility, reduce risk, accelerate to market, and reduce hard costs using one web-based software platform that all of the internal and third party participants in your private brand supply chain can access from anywhere, anytime.
BLUE offers Label and Artwork Management software, the only software-as-a-service, cloud-based platform that integrates online proofing, automated workflow and a digital asset manager – crucial in developing artwork and labeling excellence for your company.
National brands have been reaping the advantages of managing their supply chain workflow with BLUE for many years, and more private label brand executives are putting BLUE to work in their retail companies to avoid waste and risk, while promoting the health of the business and optimizing the resources they already have. BLUE gives you the ability to make your private brand supply chain more efficient.
