India’s largest footwear retailer improves its supply chain performance by enabling inventory visibility from vendors

Industry: Retail
Number of vendors: 130+
Region: Pan, India
Business impact: Achieved 99% accuracy in shipments from vendors

About
The client is a leading footwear manufacturer and the largest shoe retailer in India. It started as a small set up in Konnagar (near Kolkata). Their network of 30,000 dealers and 1375 retail stores cater to millions of customers in metros, mini-metros, and towns.

Challenges
The client wanted to gain better visibility in the operations of their vendor OEMs. Vendor visibility is critical for organizations to be able to map the performance of their vendors and subsequently the success of their businesses. The client was no different.  A total of 130+ OEMs were producing footwear for them under different categories. With their existing paper-based model of data entry, there was no way for them to access real-time information on the status of production operations carried out at the suppliers’ plants. Consequently, the number of cases of untimely delivery and wrong/over shipments at the regional distribution center were on a rise, thereby creating serious storage space issues. Since there was no visibility of the material sent to the regional distribution center, the material planning could only be done once the client received the material from vendors which delayed the process of store supply planning by as long as a week.