The are significant retailer benefits to be derived from operating a successful ambient consolidation scheme some of these are:
- Increased visibility and control over the supply of goods to RDC and the potential to reduce RDC stockholding.
- Increased fleet utilisation especially on backhaul journeys post store delivery.
- Reduced haulage costs meaning benefit sharing with suppliers achievable.
- Simplified supply solution for supplier generating benefit sharing.
Obviously there are challenges for the retailer to overcome the main one being:
-Achieving sufficient volume throughput to generate a reduction of haulage and RDC operating costs
This is overcome with the collaborative approach but collaboration brings its own challenges namely:
- Coordination of multiple retailers
- Management of single suppliers stock holding for multiple retail accounts from the same site.
