Retail Analytics Using SAS: Experience of Fresh Greens Pvt. Ltd., Bangalore

-- Shailendra Dasari and Anil S Kurhekar

India is witnessing a retail explosion. Leverage of the enormously available customer data for aligning precious resources with customers' needs makes it imperative for retail managers to deploy advanced tools and techniques for data analysis and generation of reports for effective decision-making. While a host of analytical processes and tools are available, a retailer needs to invest selectively and adopt to those applications that are proven to be successful, and resulted in substantial savings in terms of money, time and shelf space. This paper, apart from highlighting the relevance and efficacy of analytics for retail industry in India, also deals with a live study undertaken at Fresh Greens Bangalore, where Market Basket Analysis (MBA) and advanced demand forecasting techniques have been used for understanding the demand associations of different fruits and vegetables and fine-tuning their operations. Based on the findings of this study, certain conclusions, not only specific to Fresh Greens, but generally applicable to fruits and vegetables retailers in India, have been drawn and suggestions are provided for enhancing the operational efficiency and effectiveness.

© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Supply Chain: A Differentiator in Marketing Fresh Produce

-- Veena A, K Nagendra Babu and H R Venkatesha

Supply Chain Management (SCM) not only helps in cutting costs, but also adds to maintain and improve the quality of fruits and vegetables (F&V) marketed. In marketing F&V, which are perishable in nature, Supply Chain (SC) plays a crucial role. The very nature of land holding by the farmers, varied climatic conditions, production spread over wide geographical area, mainly in remote villages, diversified consumption patterns and poor SC infrastructure makes SCM for F&V more complicated. In India, SCM is at its nascent stage in marketing of F&V. Marketing of F&V is challenging because of the perishabality, seasonality and bulkiness and consumption habits of the Indian consumers. In addition to this, poor SC infrastructure, poor private equity in SC and conventional small-scale unorganized retailers, make state-of-the-art SC challenging in the present scenario. The Indian retail market is mainly dominated by unorganized retailers. The unorganized retailers are not a homogeneous group. Recent development in retailing is the entry of large number of organized retailers. Current SC catering mainly to the unorganized retailers is riddled with number of drawbacks. As per the survey conducted for this study, important drawbacks of the current SC are number of intermediaries, high level of wastage, quality degradation, poor infrastructural facilities and high cost. Fresh produce market has immense influence on the socioeconomic and even political conditions. Close to 30% of the F&V grown is going waste. All the stakeholders have to join hands to improve SC mechanism to take produce from the farmers to the consumers. This would facilitate the consumers to get quality produce at economical rates. The middlemen and all the stakeholders in the SC benefit from the improved SC infrastructure. Government and private operators have to join hands to improve the physical infrastructure, information sharing, and the service required for quality improvement of the SC.

© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Development of Optimal Pricing Strategy for Perishable Products

-- Srikanta Routroy and Dilpreet Singh

Perishable products are now becoming more perishable due to an increase in the rate of technology innovation, changing customer behavior and increase in the number of competitors. Therefore, managing perishable products in the supply chain is quite difficult, and enhancing profit in perishable supply chain is not easy. As demand for perishable products is dependent on price, developing a pricing strategy is an important issue. In this paper, a generic model is proposed for one stage of perishable supply chain in a dynamic pricing environment, for developing pricing strategy in order to maximize profit. Genetic algorithm toolbox in MATLAB 7.8 is used to solve the problem.

© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Logistics Chain Re-Engineering of a PSU Company Using Dynamic Modeling: A Case Study

-- Vivek V K, Pradeep Kumar and Dinesh Kumar

Logistics activities are being looked upon as a promising area for change because of the major potential available in improving the customer satisfaction and simultaneously reducing the logistics related costs. The analysis of dynamic behavior of complex logistics chains resulting from a re-engineering effort is a difficult task because of the interaction among various components of the system, many of which are non-linear and time-delayed. Dynamic modeling is a technique to understand the dynamic behavior of such complex systems. This paper presents the re-engineering effort on the outbound logistics chain of a Public Sector Undertaking (PSU) in India using dynamic modeling. A valid dynamic model of the outbound logistics chain was developed and analyzed to identify the possible areas of improvement. Alternative configurations taking advantage of these opportunities were developed. The performance of the present and alternative configurations was computed using a Performance Indicator (PI) incorporating cost and service level. Further, the impact of unexpected step and impulse rise in demand on the performance of the alternative configurations were evaluated. The alternative configurations resulted in significantly better performance compared to the present configuration, resulting in reduced inventory and cost. They also performed satisfactorily during the unexpected demand conditions.

© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Suppliers to Dealers: Stakeholders' Management at TVS Motor Company Ltd.

-- Shashank Shah and A Sudhir Bhaskar

Suppliers and dealers are two important stakeholders of any corporate organization, especially those dealing in products. The suppliers provide raw materials at the right time and right place every time and thus, help the organization to meet the customers' demands. The dealers, on the other hand, are the face of the organization before the prospective customers and act as an important channel of communication between the organization and the final consumers. It is for this reason that enlightened business organizations today, treat their suppliers and dealers as members of their extended business family and as equal and long-term partners in progress. In this paper, the authors have used the case study of a two-wheeler automobile industry leader—TVS Motor Company Ltd., and attempted to describe their supplier- and dealer-focussed initiatives. The data collection for the case has been done by the authors through personal interviews with top executives of the company and supplemented through other information available in the public domain.

© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.

Supply Chain Risk Identification and Elimination: A Theoretical Perspective

-- Santanu Mandal

Various types of supply and demand uncertainties existing at different nodes of a supply chain giving rise to a variety of risks that can be defined from different perspectives.This gives rise to multi-approaches to risk classification. The purpose of this paper is to review published approaches to supply chain risk identification, classification and elimination, with relation to performance.This review includes many past and present studies and is a source of useful references for those examining supply chain risk. This paper advises academicians to work further in identifying specific risks, and ways of managing the same in specific industry context. For managers, it provides knowledge of the types of risks that may be present in their supply chain and presents a variety of strategies for identifying and managing the same.

© 2011 IUP. All Rights Reserved.