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D. Murali

Chennai , Nov. 7

JDA Software Group Inc (www.jda.com) is a global player in `demand chain'. According to the company's site, JDA has `more than 5,500 retail, manufacturing and wholesale-distribution customers in 60 countries'.

Here is Dr Rahul V. Altekar, Senior Functional Architect of the company, taking on a few questions from Business Line on retail logistics.

How critical is logistics to the retail sector?

Very critical, I'd say. Also, it is one of the major success factors.

What can be the logistics cost as a percentage of the sticker price? Are there any benchmarks?

Logistics cost range from 6 per cent to 12 per cent, across industries, across regions. There are good benchmarks too for this.

Can you describe how a retail player goes about laying the logistics backbone for the operations?

He could think at least at two levels, viz. strategic and tactical.

The other dimensions can be outsourced logistics operations.

Many factors need to be considered. Such as: Items or services catered to; specificities of regions, resources, targets, and expected collaboration levels; formats of retail operation; time dimensions in terms of shelf life, lead times, conversions, packaging, handling and so forth.

Any metrics in this sphere?

The best way is to follow SCOR (supply-chain operations and reference) metrics to analyse, and to find out the scope of future improvements.

SCOR model identifies more than 200 key performance metrics to help monitor supply chain performance.

More Stories on : Interview | Software | Supply Chain Management | Retailing

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