Neel Sharma, President Taking up the center stage, supply chain management is globalized more than ever, and is placed among the key levers of business success. With the ecommerce giant like Amazon raising the bar for customer experience, and the highly technology-savvy customer, the rubber meets the road when retailers manage large and complex supply chains and struggle to keep up with the changes and the latest trends. Amidst these changes, one of the supply chain aspects that has risen high up the business agenda these days is replenishment management.
“Businesses are aiming at shorter replenishment management cycles to restock items on their catalogs. The smaller and more frequent transactional flow merchandising groups, including order forecast, purchase orders, invoice flows, acknowledgment of orders going through the supply chain, adds to the complexity of the supply chain. Besides, ERP systems are flooded with the transactional data between retailers and the global supply chain partners, which is almost impossible to be processed in a manual environment,” says Neel Sharma, a well recognized technologist within the North American manufacturing, retail & distribution sectors. In the midst of these deepest complexities, there is an opportunity for innovation to take over. As such, companies like SPICE Technology Group were born. With an aim to digitize the supply chain system, SPICE Technology efficiently assists companies in managing the flow of information between merchants, the supply chain firms to their global partner base.
With Sharma at the helm as the co-founder and partner, SPICE Technology brings in comprehensive consulting services and rich expertise in merchandising, supply chain, eCommerce and information technology. Aimed at facilitating communication between the stakeholders involved in the retail ecosystem with the aid of a digital platform, SPICE Technology caters to large, mid as well as small-sized retail, brands, logistics firms and similar organizations.
For instance, the company enables suppliers to partner with logistics organizations for supplying products to local retailers. In essence, the company connects trading partner data networks with buyer-seller organizations via a digital platform, leveraging affordable and easy-to-implement cloud technology.
In an attempt to ensure a seamless transition of the traditional supply chain into a digital process, SPICE Technology offers four core solutions. Starting with SPICE Connect, the primary objective of the product is to digitally connect supply chain organizations with their trading partners for accelerating exchange of order-related information, utilizing the base systems and mobile applications. SPICE Catalogue focuses on minimizing the time consumed in the process of standardizing the product data coming from the suppliers followed by the integration of information into the core ERP and analytics applications that monitor performance metrics. This effectively speeds up the process of listing the products in-store and online, and start selling them within the stipulated time. SPICE Catalogue is an essential tool to bridge the gap between the requirement and supply of product data in ERP and e-commerce websites.
Added to that, SPICE Trade assists organizations solve wholesale as well as manufacturing issues while attempting to sell products at small retail channels. “Brands generally engage in manual processes while dealing with small retailers. SPICE Trade enables them to approach independent retail communities and setup an affordable omnichannel B2B experience,” states Sharma. Lastly, the SPICE Express model helps retailers and suppliers to develop a drop-ship network, thereby speeding up the process of catalog content onboarding, purchase order management, ensuring visibility of product shipment and scorecard management.
SPICE Technology observes a series of processes while engaging with clients, attaining a better understanding of client requirements, and suggests best-in-class solutions for supply chain executors. SPICE Technology Group is currently making headways toward analytics with an objective to improve information flow in the supply chain and retail industry. “We are focusing on incorporating AI and machine learning to help clients handle and utilize the information in the cloud to manage supply chain processes better,” concludes Sharma.
