Accelerating Digital Transformation to Mitigate Risk and Achieve Resilience in Retail and Consumer Goods Supply Chains

This IDC Perspective highlights the critical need for digital transformation in retail and consumer goods supply chains to mitigate risk and achieve resilience. Retailers and other consumer-focused businesses require an open, digital environment to ensure that product, asset, and customer data is connected to enable cross-enterprise teams to collaborate, innovate, and operate their R&D, design and development, production, supply chain, in-store, and post-consumer functions in an optimal, sustainable, and profitable fashion. Enterprises that move quickly to keep on top of current trends and meet end-consumer demand can benefit from a cloud-based digital approach.Modern, data-driven, cloud-based platforms allow organizations to be more agile in the face of unexpected disruption or opportunity. True resilience requires digital, cloud-based platforms to enable best practices that encompass data, applications, and operations, as well as internal and external expertise. IDC believes that digital transformation is essential for enabling organizations to respond to customer and patient needs quickly and remain vital in the face of existing and new competition."For concept-to-consumer supply chains to achieve efficiency in retail and other consumer industries, data must be unified across value chains and include R&D, design, planning, production, supply chain, sales, and marketing," said Jordan K. Speer, research director, Worldwide Retail Product Sourcing, Fulfillment and Sustainability Strategies at IDC. "A cloud-based environment enables this connectivity and speed of product development and delivery through rapid scalability, on-demand resource allocation, streamlined collaboration tools, and automated processes. Businesses gain access to data when they need it and can use analytics and AI to see patterns and understand events faster, leading to more intelligent decisions across the end-to-end value chain. Teams can quickly iterate on designs, test features, launch products, and deliver inventory to market faster than is possible with traditional on-premises systems. Such an environment also allows employees to share and access data from any location, on any device, in real time or near real time."