It’s more than halfway to December and Halloween decorations are already out on shelves and your most prepared customers will have all of their holiday shopping done before you can get your best offers out.

 

Even with enough time to prepare, the best logistical tacticians will have trouble meeting the demands of the holiday surge without using the best tools to bring products to market faster.

 

Let’s bring our minds back from the beach as the summer enters its final months and think seriously about what lies ahead for the rest of the year. Retailers who have thousands of stores, hundreds of manufacturers, dozens of vendors will need to manage those relationships to keep up with a boom in spending that will likely only be bolstered by the growth of e-commerce in 2017.

 

When entering a high demand phase, its crucial to have tools that allow your team and its partners to scale and efficiently execute on higher holiday-related product volume. Even half of a year might not be enough time to deliver a full rollout of your best products – that can very often take more than six months when using manual processes and outdated tools like Excel.

 

During a time of high demand, Bamboo Rose helped a multi-channel specialty retailer scale its supply chain processes and cut its product rollout from seven months to under 90 days. The tools that Bamboo Rose provided helped this retailer to:

 

• Reduce the number of EDI vendors from 250 to two
• Eliminate all EDI transaction fees entirely
• Reduce the average price of invoice processing from $30 to ~$2
• Provide end-to-end order management visibility
• Enable complete regulatory compliance
• Gain visibility throughout entire process from production and packing, to shipping, customs and delivery

While you might not want to think about digitizing your back-end to prep for the holidays as you dig your toes in the sand and skim through your summer beach read, those are the details that can make a critical difference when the holidays hit and your supply chain is put under intense strain. Using a platform that can streamline and speed up your product development might even let the procrastinators among us make up for lost time.

 

So, feel free to enjoy the nice weather, but don’t forget – winter is coming.

 

Worried that your tools are too outdated to keep up with the holiday crunch? Find out what your retail peers said about the sourcing tools they use every day.