ANAHEIM, Calif., Sept. 18, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- CSCMP EDGE
2019 -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced IBM Inventory
Visibility, a modular supply chain application that helps companies
in high-turn inventory industries improve omnichannel profitability
and customer experience. With a single, real-time view of inventory
tracking and all available-to-promise inventory across the entire
fulfillment network, companies can optimize order management
processes, globally. IBM Inventory Visibility increases inventory
ROI by balancing inventory to increase turns, while reducing
necessary safety stock and carrying costs. The time, cost, and risk
to deploy is reduced using a cloud-based business service
architecture designed to integrate seamlessly with existing order
management or ERP systems – not just IBM Order Management – to
quickly innovate.
Inventory Visibility helps address what IBM sees as today's most
pressing fulfillment and inventory challenges including:
- Lack of accurate available-to-promise inventory levels across
channels, resulting in lost sales and poor customer
experiences
- Giving away margin due to markdowns and unplanned expedited
shipping charges
- Limited ability to enter new channels to grow their
business
"In a growing hunger to offer increasingly convenient and
flexible shopping options to their consumers, retail company
consumer fulfilment processes have become increasingly complex.
Retailers now recognize that investment in distributed order
management (DOM) systems is necessary to manage this growing
consumer order fulfillment complexity," wrote Tom Enright, VP
Analyst, Gartner. "Such varied shopping patterns generate
unpredictability into a retailer's fulfilment and inventory
positioning practices…Expect some minor and unanticipated interface
requirement changes to emerge during the build stage. During this
stage, place a primary level of importance upon the need to
understand end-to-end inventory."1
IBM Inventory Visibility provides a single view of inventory
across disparate systems and silos to more consistently meet
customer expectations. Real-time updates facilitate accurate
inventory counts to help avoid overpromising, losing sales or
incurring unexpected shipping charges. Inventory ROI can be
maximized by tracking the demand for inventory turns to customize
safety stock by location – and get cross-channel insights to better
balance inventory.
The cloud-based IBM Inventory Visibility is engineered to detect
fluctuations in demand and auto-scales without IT support even in
high-browse volume businesses to support peak usage or holiday
demand. Designed to integrate seamlessly with existing order
management or ERP systems as well as new sales channels, it does
not require long or expensive IT initiatives thereby accelerating
the time to innovate and exceed business goals. The open
architecture is designed to allow IT resources to make software
changes and quickly deploy without significant up-front investment
and to decrease time to value.
"I have seen that smart brands have learned a cohesive
omnichannel strategy – inclusive of physical locations—can be a
very powerful differentiator and is no longer optional as order
fulfillment and speed of delivery have grown in importance with
customers expecting to receive what they want, when and where they
want it," said Jeanette Barlow, VP
of Offering Management, IBM Watson Supply Chain. "This level of
service fundamentally impacts the cost to serve every order. Legacy
ERP and eCommerce order capture systems cannot provide a complete,
real-time view of all inventory as SaaS-based solutions can, and
also quickly integrate into any channel to optimize
profitability."
Complementing Inventory Visibility's release, IBM Supply Chain
is increasing its focus to support new levels of enablement for
clients' and business partners' technical staff with purpose-built
training and badges to showcase their achievements and
contributions to the business. The first course, "Practical
Implementation of IBM Inventory Visibility," is associated
with earning an Inventory Visibility Developer Expert Badge. This
demonstrates skills and experience needed to connect Inventory
Visibility to enterprise apps, such as IBM Order Management, SAP,
or Oracle as well as custom Java applications.
1 Gartner, Best Practices for Implementing
Retail Distributed Order Management System, Tom Enright, Refreshed 7
March, 2019, Published 18 November
2017.
About IBM Supply Chain
A world leader in AI software,
services and technology for business, IBM has deployed Watson
solutions in thousands of engagements with clients across 20
industries and 80 countries. IBM Watson Supply Chain enables
forward thinking supply chain business professionals to improve
business outcomes by providing AI-powered insights, B2B
collaboration and orchestration that mitigates operational impact
and business risk. For more information visit:
https://www.ibm.com/supply-chain
Contacts:
Erik
Mason
External Communications – IBM Watson Supply Chain
erik.mason@ibm.com
508-208-6617
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SOURCE IBM