Supply Chain,Technology | 301 days ago |

RedPrairie Corporation, and customer Sony of Canada Ltd., have been selected as finalists for the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) and SupplyChainBrain’s Supply Chain Innovation Award. The award recognizes the best and most innovative solutions and ideas in the supply chain profession.

RedPrairie and Sony (Canada) were nominated for this award based on a case study detailing the challenges, new ideas and successful implementation of a Collaborative Flowcasting/store level distribution resource planning (DRP) solution for Sony of Canada. RedPrairie and Sony of Canada’s case study was selected as one of eight finalists from among 50 submissions.

In 2009, Sony (Canada) implemented RedPrairie’s store level DRP system to help profitably manage its retail supply chain, including many specialized “slow-selling” items with high price points, which create hard-to-forecast, intermittent demand patterns.

“This was a relatively simple implementation with quick results,” said Rick Courtin, business process manager at Sony of Canada. “Store level DRP gave us the ability to improve store in-stocks and reduce inventory quickly, while at the same time providing us with the ability to automate many tasks that were manual and very cumbersome in the past. Thanks to the new system, we can now focus on fire prevention activities instead of being in a constant state of firefighting.”

“The farther away from the consumer forecasting takes place, the less accurate forecasts are likely to be,” explained the “father of DRP,” Andre Martin, co-founder of RedPrairie’s Collaborative Flowcasting Group. ”The retail store is both the beginning and the end of retail supply chains. It’s the beginning of the information flow and the end of product delivery. Our approach is to create a computer-based model of the actual retail business; a representation of the real world, which can be used to intuitively model how demand will actually occur.”