Case Study: Same-Day Delivery
A large number of physical retailers are turning to eCommerce in order to compete with large online retailers that offer more flexibility. Online stores have integrated competitive shipping options in order to survive in the highly competitive online shopping market. Such shipping solutions include Amazon’s Prime Local Express Delivery, Wal-Mart’s Same Day Delivery, eBay Now, and U.S. Postal Service’s Metro Post. Today’s companies that have embraced same-day delivery hope to succeed in a field where others such as Kozmo and Urbanfetch failed. The failure of the two can be attributed to lack of funding but as Chowdhry (n.p.) puts it, they were operating ahead of their time considering the poor Internet infrastructure in place then.
A number of factors need to be put into consideration when operating same-day delivery services. The first one is speed. The whole concept of setting up same-day delivery services is to promote efficiency in product delivery. This is what makes large companies like Amazon make a move of setting up warehouses in every la...
The following case describes FedEx’s transition from a single segment Express shipping company to a fully integrated, multi-faceted corporation. At the beginning, Federal Express was an air express transportation system designed specifically for shipping time-sensitive items like urgent documents or medicines. After receiving a large investment, Federal Express began its first night of operations on April 17, 1973. Within the first 10 years, Federal Express became the first U.S. start-up to achieve $1 billion in revenues. Nevertheless, in the late 1990’s with the development of technology, FedEx began to express concern in some areas of business. E-mail, its competitors (UPS), new innovative supply chain strategies with low production
Amazon.com’s US operation business model is based on “sell all, carry few”. Amazon offers consumers a wide selection of products while keeping inventories at low levels. A major interest for Amazon in the US is optimization of netwo...
Key Issues The growing popularity of online retailing is attracting competition from traditional and online multi-retailers such as Wal-Mart and Amazon, which are gaining considerable market shares in many of the product segments included in the specialty retail sector. Currently, the majority of revenue is generated by store sales, but online sales from the stores’ websites are increasing. With the US dollar getting weaker, international sales from these US based websites are increasing too. This creates a significant positive outlook for the large incumbent players but also acts as a significant barrier of entry for new players.
The ecommerce industry is growing faster than ever. TJ Maxx needs to start focusing more on ecommerce not only to keep up with competition, but also to make sure they do well during weak economic periods. ecommerce, overall, tends to do very well during lackluster economic times. TJ Maxx will be able to cut costs more easily the more they expand their ecommerce business. Our business idea will allow them to expand their ecommerce as we will take over their website and delivery. TJX Companies’ three ecommerce sites accounts for only about 1.0% of the company’s total sales. However, the online channel is a key growth driver and TJX is taking initiatives to improve its online business. The ecommerce sales
In addition to the change in behavior of consumer, many companies or retailers change the sales channel combinations. The greatest impact of the Web-bases electronic revolution has occurred in companies adopting the click-and-mortar approach. Click- and-mortar is one the strategy used by the companies or retailers that they continue to conduct their business in the physical locations and have added the electronic commerce component to their business activities. According to one study, 37% of United States retailers are selling through a combination of the internet, in stores and catalogs. This represents a growing demand for the business-to-customer package delivery service.
...ng luxury, not many people want to wait two weeks to receive their product. When an item is ordered, it is needed immediately, and if it is received immediately then it not only improve the relationship to the customer. But it will also add value to the purchase which makes that customer that much more likely to buy the product again in the future, as opposed to your competitors. If you have customers in remote areas you do not have the luxury to send their shipment in a large batch of items, you must pay more to have that item shipped individually, which is costing more money.
The Home Depot Supply Chain Management model is based on integrated inventory management through a centralized network of 20 distribution centers, called Rapid Deployment Centers (RDCs) and three Direct Fulfillment Centers (DFCs) aimed at the e-commerce market (Bond, 2015). Orders are processed and managed to meet current and forecasted demands, sent to the regional RDCs, which service approximately 100 stores each, and sent to retail outlets to meet stock requirements (Bond, 2015). Direct Fulfillment Centers are e-commerce distribution systems. Home Depot delivers within a two-day timeframe to 90% of US based customers, and the system also leverages in store stock for same day pick-up (Bond,
Amazon is the biggest online store in the world; since its creation in 1995, Amazon has adopted improvements throughout its processes changing considerately. This reports describes the changes adopted by Amazon. In addition, this report generates a diagnosis of each step and makes a deep analysis of the decision makings by amazon based on three specific topic; 1) when Amazon managed inventory internally; 2) when Amazon decided to outsource inventory management and lastly when amazon decided to sell products of competing retailers on its site.
Zappos creates a supply web, to maintain sales growth and for the ease of customers. It increased zappo’s sale of products in the online-market; thus, improving the revenue and yearly profits. On the other hand Zappos supply chain was not as effortless as the linear process of placing orders with its suppliers, stocking inventory and shipping orders to the customers. Zappos brought 6pm- a discount online retailer, so the 6pm dot com website sold a product that was in the Shepherdsville warehouse, exactly in the same way as the Zappo’s website.The products were stored in the same way for both sites, even though these two websites shows different
In the competitive environment, it is necessary for moving products involves reception of products at an intermediate location, store, repackage, clear customs and transport to final destination. The other factor in the supply chain logistics is speed given information flows fast in the internet era. The customer expects everything quick accustomed to the instant status access to the information. With the real time inventory, customer expects the location of the product, it is next scheduled movement and the final delivery schedule.
Amazon.com was a venture into an emerging market of internet and had to face hidden and unexpected hurdles in order to survive and excel in the market. Therefore, Amazon.com kept modifying its strategies with their focus on enhancing customer experience of online shopping and to delivery exceptional services with complete convenience to their customers. One of the major strategic decisions was to compromise on cost saving stragegy when Amazon.com started to maintain its own warehouses in different countries in order to ensure timely and accurate delivery to their customers
Since its launch in the mid '90s, Dell's e-commerce business has been a poster child for the benefits of online sales, says Aberdeen Group analyst Kent Allen. The company's strategy of selling over the Internet -- with no retail outlets and no middleman -- has been as discussed, admired and imitated as any e-commerce model. Dell's online sales channel has proven so successful, says Allen that the computer industry must ask: "Does the consumer need to go to the store to buy a PC anymore?"
Amazon’s also tried to spearhead the industry by introducing the customer-pleasing traits in terms of the technology, order fulfillment and retailing strategies categori...
This is the activity carried out by organizations that own production sites, and their performance has a major impact on product cost, quality, speed of delivery and delivery reliability, and flexibility [8]. As it is quite an important part of the supply chain, production needs to be measured and continuously improved. Suitable metrics for the production level are as follows. Order lead-time, the total order cycle time, called order to delivery cycle time, refers to the time elapsed in between the receipt of customer order until the delivery of finished goods to the customer. The reduction in order cycle time leads to reduction in supply chain response time, and as such is an important performance measure and source of competitive advantage [9]. It directly interacts with customer service in determining competitiveness. Range of product and services: According to [8] a plant that manufactures a broad product range is likely to introduce new products more slowly than plants with a narrow product range. Plants that can manufacture a wide range of products are likely to perform less well in the areas of value added per employee, speed and delivery reliability. This clearly suggests that product range affects supply chain performance. Effectiveness of scheduling techniques is another important measure of supply chain effectiveness. Scheduling refers to the time or date on or by which
All choices made by Seven-Eleven are structured to lower its transportation and receiving costs. For example, its area-dominance strategy of opening at least 50 to 60 stores in an area helps with marketing but also lowers the cost of replenishment. All manufacturing facilities are centralized to get the maximum benefit of capacity aggregation and also lower the inbound transportation cost from the manufacturer to the distribution center (DC). Seven-Eleven also requires all suppliers to deliver to the DC where products are sorted by temperature. This reduces the outbound transportation cost because of aggregation of deliveries across multiple suppliers. It also lowers the receiving cost. The information infrastructure is set up to allow store managers to place orders based on analysis of consumption data. The information infrastructure also facilitates the sorting of an order at the DC and receiving of the order at the store. The key point to emphasize here is that most decisions by Seven-Eleven are structured to aggregate transportation and receiving to make both cheaper.