Overview of the Retail Industry

The retail industry across the globe is fragmented and include companies selling goods and commodities for household consumption. The retail industry relies on factors such as increasing disposable income, rising consumer spending, and relative growth in the GDP to gain sustainable growth. Additionally, today, consumers across the globe are longing for convenience, creativity, and authenticity in the products being offered to them due to the recent shift to a more customer-driven economy. Amid fluctuating consumer preferences and rising consumer spending habits, the growing incidence of improved lifestyles around the world is inspiring the growth of the retail industry.

However, the retail industry is expected to witness a few challenges in the coming years. The factors include:

• Supply chain: Retail industry firms are coming up with feasible ways to curtail the operational cost without comprising on the quality of the products offered to encounter the rising demands of the target audience. Additionally, companies need to ensure that right products are delivered to the consumers at the right time to stand a chance in this competitive market.
• Higher disposable income: Over the next few years, customer spending power is likely to increase due to the steady recovery of the global economy.

These factors are forcing companies in the retail industry space to leverage the use of procurement best practices solutions. Procurement best practices solutions provide firms information about the best practices followed by their peers in the industry space and ensure the delivery of high-quality product and service offerings and personalized experience while controlling costs and driving profitability. These solutions also help companies adopt best-in-class sourcing and procurement strategies across their business operations.

The Business Challenge and Journey

The client, a leading multi-brand retailer with business units spread across the globe, wanted to identify their peers across the retail industry space, key suppliers, and evaluate their sourcing and procurement best practices and capabilities to cut down their maverick spends across the supply chain. Additionally, they wanted to discover innovative potential partners along with advanced risk management strategies, control capabilities, and governance throughout the supply chain and service provider networks.

To help the client adopt best-in-class sourcing and procurement strategies, the best practices experts at SpendEdge tailored a comprehensive research methodology. The all-inclusive methodology included primary research coupled with qualitative and quantitative data collection procedures. The experts also gathered information from a wide array of secondary sources such as paid, company presentations, industry forums, and industry database in the retail industry space.

The procurement best practices engagement helped the retail industry client identify high-performing and low-risk suppliers and service providers to control costs associated with regulatory compliance. Additionally, the client obtained insights into a supplier, category, region, and branch level spend intelligence to guide capital allocation strategies. This helped them achieve operational efficiency and strict spend compliance.

Fundamental questions answered in this procurement best practices study include

The Results

The retail industry client identified the functional drivers and commercial decisions that impacted the profitability and implement best-in-class sourcing and procurement strategies. This helped them save millions across the supply chain.

To know more about our procurement best practices solutions for retail industry

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