The upcoming peak shipping season appears poised for disappointment, with reports indicating that retailers have made efforts to trim excess inventories. However, a cloud of uncertainty lingers over the availability of disposable income for consumers in the coming months, along with their willingness to allocate spending toward goods rather than experiences. We spoke to Mark Holmes, Senior Advisor for Global Supply Chain, InterSystems and more about the peak season below:
What are your predictions for the peak season?
It looks like we will have another disappointing peak shipping season. While some reports suggest that retailers have managed to reduce bloated inventories, there remains a question around disposable income availability in the coming months from consumers, and willingness to spend on goods over experiences.
For supply chain leaders, this means managing fluctuating demands and avoiding disruptions in real-time with accurate data and ROI-based insights is key.
How would you evaluate the readiness for this peak season?
With continued changing consumer behavior and the impact of geopolitical events continuing to be felt globally, meeting customer demand in an optimised way is going to be a challenge.
Events of recent years have shown us that we can’t prepare for everything, but positively, many organisations should be much further down the digital transformation journey in building a more resilient and agile supply chain.
Creating a connective tissue with all sources of disparate data from first mile all the way through to last mile enabling unified data with one reality of your supply chain is critical. Just as critical will be to ensure the data is accurate or “quality of data”. Has it been harmonised and normalised in real-time from any data source.
Without quality data, nothing can be optimised of any value.
