Top Retail Companies Unite to Expand Supply Chain Best Practices Review

Effort includes Best Buy, JC Penney, Rite Aid, Safeway and Target; Tompkins Associates, Soleus Group to lead benchmarking survey

Effort includes Best Buy, JC Penney, Rite Aid, Safeway and Target; Tompkins Associates, Soleus Group to lead benchmarking survey

Raleigh, NC — April 20, 2005 — Five leading retail companies have joined forces to continue and expand an in-depth review of the supply chain best practices and metrics of the world's leading retail companies.

Best Buy, JC Penney, Rite Aid, Safeway and Target have formed the Advisory Board for the 2005 Retail Supply Chain Best Practices Review. The primary topics that the Advisory Board plans to review and analyze in 2005 include distribution center operations, direct-to-consumer operations and transportation (including international, ocean and truck).

The Advisory Board will oversee the collection and analysis of responses from participating companies through a Web-based interview tool. The data analyzed will be presented to participants in a series of reports and review meetings intended to provide very specific insights into the current and best practices of retail companies within various industry segments.

Charting Next Steps

Supporting the Advisory Board in the execution of the Supply Chain Best Practices Review will be Tompkins Associates and The Soleus Group, which have developed an alliance to jointly market and deliver supply chain benchmarking services. This best practices review is intended to provide a foundation for delivering improved supply chain execution results and strategy breakthroughs.

"There is tremendous value to retailers who participate in the next segment of the retail best practices review," said Jim Tompkins, president of Tompkins Associates, a supply chain consulting and integration firm. "It will enable them to look beyond the bounds of their distribution networks and begin to identify opportunities that will strengthen their supply chains."

Tompkins added that continuing and expanding the best practices review will allow industries to compare their operations to their peers, to best practices and to emerging supply chain innovations. "They will also be able to chart the next steps they should take towards using their supply chains for competitive advantage," Tompkins said.

Retail-specific Insights

John Traendly, managing partner of the Soleus Group, the leading supply chain benchmarking firm, added, "These top-performing retailers will complete a process that provides insight into incremental and quantum improvement opportunities that uniquely fit retail-specific strategies."

The initial Retail Supply Chain Best Practices Review, which took place in 2004 and focused on inbound supply chain practices, included retailers with over $500 billion in sales, 87,000 retail outlets and 3.8 million associates. The first phase of this ongoing retail review included 3,000 questions across 37 different functional topics. Participants in the 2005 Best Practices Review will receive access to the results of the 2004 review.

Retail companies interested in learning how they can participate in the Supply Chain Best Practices Review may contact Mike Futch at 919-855-5505 for more information.

The focus in the retail sector has shifted from managing the movement of goods to managing the information about goods. Read more in "Ramping Up the Retail Supply Chain," in the February/March 2005 issue of Supply & Demand Chain Executive.

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