Prince Retail Transforms Supplier Collaboration with Vendor Link
The Results
- Reduced cost of order to pay cycle management
- Faster, error-free PO and payment processing
- Enhanced stock availability
- Improved promotions effectiveness
- Improved collaboration planning
The Client
Based in Cebu City, Prince Retail is a chain of retail and wholesale stores that was founded in 1990 by Robert Lim Go. Operating under the Prince Hypermart banner, Prince Retail is a one-stop shop, providing customers with a wide variety of grocery, general merchandise, and department store items.
The retailer has over 67 stores spread across Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao. Its network of over 500+ suppliers helps it serve its mission of ‘serving the underserved’, focusing on Filipino shoppers in far flung and rural and island provinces and providing quality products at affordable prices with a convenient and comfortable shopping experience.
The Challenge
As one of the fastest-growing retailers in the Philippines, Prince Retail faced multiple challenges that could impede its growth plans.
One of the major challenges it faced was the increasing complexity and cost of vendor management due to a lack of collaboration and transparency between its merchandising team and suppliers.
Vendor processes—order management, scheduling, payments, promotions, demand planning, and reporting—were operating in silos and prone to manual errors.
The retailer’s vendors showed low confidence in the data that was currently being shared – often leading to longer lead times, low fulfillment rate and stock availability at the stores. As a result, vendors were less proactive in their approach to promotions and other programs.
1 Intelligent & Agile Supplier Collaboration with Vendor Link
With the above challenges at the fore, Prince Retail was looking for a solution that could:
- Streamline and optimize fragmented and siloed vendor processes such as order to pay cycle, stock allocation, promotions planning, and reporting.
- Create a hyper-connected vendor ecosystem that shares shopper insights and reports with vendors to help them with planning and promotions.
- Accelerate digital transformation and build data-driven decisioning both internally and externally to achieve operational excellence.
Algonomy’s Vendor Link fit in perfectly with the client’s requirement of a 360-degree supplier collaboration platform. Vendor Link is a comprehensive web-based vendor and retailer collaboration platform that removes operational silos between vendors and retailers by automating and streamlining end-to-end operations, and sharing data and insights across category, sales, and inventory.
Vendor Link helped Prince Retail’s buyers better manage purchase orders across stores. Siloed communication and follow up emails and calls were replaced with a centralized web-based order tracking system accessible by vendors.
As a result, manual errors were eliminated, and buyers and vendors were able to spend more time on value-adding activities.
Vendor Link also improved payment visibility wherein vendors can now track their payment status in real time and improve their delivery schedule to Prince Retail, hence boosting shelf availability.
2 The ROI of Automated Supplier Management
The client benefited from Vendor Link in the following ways:
- With the help of Vendor Link’s tracking and collaborative features, PO and payment processing became significantly faster, transparent, and error-free. As a result, the customer was able to reduce costs and improve effectiveness in order to pay cycle management.
- Vendor Link enabled interactive on-demand access to data insights and reports for suppliers. Buyers and Finance teams can now easily share data, insights, and reports with vendors and vice-versa. This improved system transparency, helping teams run effective programs with reduced costs.
- The client witnessed reduction in vendor disputes and an overall improvement in vendor buyer collaborative planning. As a result, client stores witnessed improved stock availability and promotion effectiveness.
Vendor Link helped Prince Retail streamline its order management process, bring transparency in its payment processing, and build a data-driven culture across its vendor ecosystem. As a result, Prince Retail saw improvement in product availability and promotions, reduction in costs, and improvement in vendor satisfaction.
3 End-to-end Campaign Management with Marketing Services
- In addition to leveraging tech, McDonald’s worked with Algonomy’s analytics and campaign specialists to extend its marketing team’s capacity to run campaigns.
- The specialists helped with the setup, execution, tracking, measurement, and reporting for optimizations.
- Moreover, the specialists assisted the CRM team and Operations team with ad-hoc analyses around insights for store operations, CRM program objectives, limited-time offers, menu combos, etc.
- With Marketing Services, McDonald’s set up complex journeys for multiple customer lifecycle scenarios (New Customers, Returning Customers, Lapsed Customers) across channels.
Vendor Link’s collaborative features and data sharing capabilities have helped Prince Retail and its suppliers in several ways. It enabled suppliers and category managers to plan faster and more accurately for promotions, inventory, and other programs.
The platform has helped Prince Retail become more adaptive. For example, it has helped them reduce inventory and other costs associated with products and promotions that don’t do as well as expected.
Vendor Link has also bolstered data-driven decision making on the supplier side. For example, the platform provided shopper insights based on POS data to suppliers.
With this, suppliers get a view of real demand in stores based on consumer sentiment, not just based on purchase orders issued by Prince. This helps them with their own forecasting to improve their relevant assortment and stocks availability, which helps Prince Retail get better stocks allocation, relevant promoted packs and assortment.
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