Sales & Operations Planning In The Retail Industry

SALES & OPERATIONS PLANNING IN THE RETAIL INDUSTRY By Jack Harwell Describes how retailers are meeting the challenges of 21st century—more SKUs, shorter life cycles, constantly changing buying habits of consumers, and products outsourced to far away places … Sales and Operations Planning – primarily a manufacturing process – can be applied in a retail environment to successfully manage the constraints of limited inventory budget, display space in the store and marketing funds. As the post-war industrial revolution in Japan reshaped the economy, Japanese manufacturers adopted practices that enabled them to threaten the existence of American manufacturers. This threat came in the last few decades of the 20th century in the form of customer preferences. American customers recognized the superior quality and better value of Japanese goods and began to express their preferences by consuming these foreign goods. To avoid extinction, manufacturers in the United States responded to this threat by aggressively improving the quality of their products, their production processes, and the supply chains. Retailers are facing pressures similar to those that American manufacturers felt ...