OTM In-a-Box: Demystifying transportation management for Retail industry
Retailers are facing stiff challenges due to globalization, increasing input costs and higher customer service expectations. In addition to this, growing service options from carriers, combined with demand for more frequent and time-definite deliveries are forcing retailers to revisit their transportation planning systems to optimize movement of goods across the distribution channel.
In recent times, Oracle Transportation Management (OTM) has emerged as a holistic solution to challenging transportation requirements in retail industry. It provides significant value to retailers as it
• Helps in greater control over supply chain from supplier to distribution centers to retail stores
• Reduce total transportation costs
• Reduce stock-outs with end-to-end visibility across the supply chain
• Improve asset utilization by managing all transportation processes – inbound and outbound – with a single, integrated system
• Provide new levels of collaboration with vendors and carriers
OTM acts as a powerful competitive differentiator – helping retailers to deliver goods at low cost, thereby allowing retailers to reduce prices on key products.
Visualizing great demand for OTM among retailers, Infosys has developed ready-to-deploy ‘OTM-In-a-Box: Retail’ solution within the Oracle® Accelerate framework. Oracle® Business Accelerators are best-in-class business solutions that reduce time & cost of OTM implementation.
‘OTM In-a-Box: Retail’ is based on industry best practices and addresses key issues faced by retailers while managing their transportation supply chain. The solution covers inbound & outbound transportation planning, freight rating, and financial settlement for point-to-point, multi-stop and multi-leg shipments across different transport modes namely Truckload (TL), Less than TL, Ocean and Air. This solution also extends to design & development of specific number of reports of medium complexity and implementation of all major workflow features.
The ‘OTM In-a-Box Plus’ is an advanced offering comprising of Cross-Docking, Consolidation & Deconsolidation Pools and Continuous Move optimizations. In addition to above features, ‘OTM In-a-Box Advanced’ deploys Fusion Transportation Intelligence, an analytical tool for business analytics and management decision making.
Retailers can definitely leverage Infosys’ ‘OTM In-a-Box: Retail’ to implement scalable enterprise transportation system in an accelerated time frame.
These offerings are even available for manufacturing which uses industry best practices to help manufacturers manage their transportation.
We would be discussing this at length at OOW'Oct'09,US.
Acknowledgement for inputs from - Nipun Lakhotia,Oracle Practice,Infosys
