Retail/Consumer Products
Collaborative Consulting understands the drivers, needs, and opportunities within the Consumer Products and Retail industry. We have established skills, experience, and solutions in this arena to help consumer product sourcing, manufacturing, distribution, marketing, sales, service, and retailing entities drive business value through their business and technology initiatives.
The Consumer Products and Retail industry faces unique challenges today. Constantly evolving entrants to the market continually shift the make-up and power structure within the industry, be they changes in channel and distribution strategies, new product innovation, new store concepts, or online plays. Margins continually take a beating as competitors and business model innovation create lower priced and higher value products, resulting in “me too” and catch up plays for the entire industry. Specialization in product offering increases in smaller players while mega-retailing continues to battle SKU diversity. Retailers are often asking themselves “Do I need to be everything to everybody or focus on my niche?” While mature, globalization of manufacturing is still evolving and the supply chain is getting riskier despite advances in visibility and technology sophistication. Globalization also brings emerging markets with their own challenges. These issues and others frame the strategic conversation among CPG/Retail operational leadership.
Looking forward we understand many key opportunities and challenges to consider. These include:
- Process simplification is critical to the bottom line, both as a cost reduction strategy and user experience tactic
- System reliability and data accuracy are paramount in POS, category management, product development, manufacturing, sourcing, supply chain, and management systems
- Channel complexity (e.g., store + web + catalog + device + kiosk ) drive technological complexity
- Legacy systems still key to core business, yet must be brought forward into new applications
- Data quality extends beyond any one system and grows more and more critical to new applications
- Current system environments are often monstrously complex, yet need to be leveraged in smart ways going forward
- Service oriented architectures are embraced within the industry
Collaborative Consulting brings specific solutions to Retail and Consumer Product Goods (CPG) organizations. These solution include:
Business architecture for Retail and CPG services focus on your business strategy enablement and business process articulation, implementation, management and improvement. >> More
Business intelligence for Retail and CPG services focus on harnessing your enterprise information to provide insight into business performance and empower business decision-making.>> More
Technology & architecture implementation for Retail and CPG services translate your business goals and needs into an optimal solution design and plan for technology build out and operations. >> More
Data integration for Retail and CPG services focus on linking your disparate systems and data to improve their value, performance, usefulness, and functionality. >> More
Software quality & performance for Retail and CPG services drive improvements into your existing and planned applications, such as improving their quality, reliability, capacity, and performance. >> More
Program & project management for Retail and CPG services enable you to successfully manage complex projects and groups of projects using formal project portfolio management practices and techniques.>> More