Designing new concepts for the next collection and keeping ahead of the competition requires creative skill to set new trends but also the ability to react quickly to trends appearing in today’s fast moving market.
Ideas and inspiration may come from catwalk shows, competition on the high street or a light bulb moment. Either way designing a new product involves consideration of not only how something will look, but also how it will be used and how it will be made.
The design team needs to consider conceptual planning, creative design and product development and have a system that allows for design collaboration.
Being able to share the output of this creative process in the form of design briefs, images and sketches in a central repository with internal colleagues and external suppliers will ensure a common understanding of the design goals and initial product requirements.
By using the 4Retail solution, QA technologists can view and mark up design sketches with their comments online and in real time, whilst workflow can ensure tight design to delivery timescales are met. 4Retail provides an audit trail and complete version history, reducing risk of errors, misunderstandings, costs and administration time.
Buying is both a creative and scientific process. A strong sense of intuition and insight is required as well as a head for what will sell and at what price point. Products are not considered in isolation but as part of a collection of merchandise. It is important that Buyers can collaborate and share product specifications to build a strong product portfolio for their brand.
At the same time, buyers and merchants are often faced with a whole raft of emails, spreadsheets, documents and other information. The task of keeping on top of changes to these items can at times seem insurmountable.
The 4Retail solution enables Buyers and Merchants to cut through this mountain of information so they can concentrate on the relevant items such as RFQs and order management.
4Retail makes it possible to share documents and mark them up on line and manage workflow. Buyers can collaborate with Suppliers, share a common understanding. Misunderstandings are therefore avoided and administration time and costs are reduced.
Quality Assurance and Quality Control are important ways of ensuring the quality of a Retailer’s products and therefore have a lot of associated documentation with their activities. Organising these and staying on top of the relevant versions can be time consuming and also leaves room for critical errors. It is vital that this information is maintained in collaboration with suppliers, internal buying or sourcing departments and external agencies such as inspection houses.
Excellent Quality management through ensuring compliance and inspectors’ records is the key to quality products delivered on time and on spec.
4Retail enables Quality departments to manage and organise the information they need. Users can collaborate effectively both internally and externally. Document management, Supplier Collaboration and Supplier Management are at the heart of 4Retail, which in turn supports a level of workflow and status to allow the Quality processes to be followed, managed and reported on. Therefore 4Retail can ensure that quality standards are met.
The supply chain is the bloodstream of the business. Supply chain operations must co-operate and collaborate with suppliers, third parties and internal departments to improve performance and guarantee a high quality product.
It is vital that the network of operations can run smoothly in order to ensure the agreed design to delivery time. All too often, the supply chain suffers as a result of too many emails and too much irrelevant information for the respective parties to wade through.
4Retail acts as a central repository, where documents can be managed, shared and accessed easily and is the key to improving supply chain management.
4Retail helps retailers ensure close collaboration around the information required to ensure a transparent and smooth flow of product. Document collaboration and management provides full visibility to potential risks, enabling corrective action plans to be implemented to ensure on-time delivery. Supplier management is made easier because 4Retail provides a platform where agents, suppliers and factories can communicate and improves the quality of relationships.
Whether rolling out new operational systems such as EPOS or embarking on a store refurbishment programme, document collaboration and management of specifications, drawings and documents can be of great assistance in ensuring costly mistakes are avoided.
4Retail can help store operations staff avoid errors and manage the workflow and status of information and documents. By uploading the latest visual merchandising plan in 4Retail, retailers can reduce printing and postage costs to stores. This means faster and more cost effective programmes delivered to budget.
Corporate information can also be accessed instantly via 4Retail and instead of distributing multiple versions of documents either in the post or via email to stores, they can simply be pointed at the central repository on the extranet. This can help to enhance a common understanding amongst employees in store and the brand identity of the business.
Attending trade fairs, providing samples and costs for new products, managing production capacity, meeting strict audit and inspection requirements, providing certification documents, revising costs based on changes to product specifications and packaging, sourcing raw materials and keeping on target with agreed to production and shipment dates for multiple global customers with the primary communication by email...
The task of keeping on top of changes to these items can at times seem insurmountable. Trawling through emails to find the latest versions of sketches, images, documents and spreadsheets can waste valuable time.
4Retail provides Suppliers with full access to the latest version of sketches, images, documents and spreadsheets. Suppliers can collaborate with Buyers, improve the quality of relationships and create a common understanding. Document management and Supplier Collaboration is enhanced because users are able to share documents, mark them up on line with colour coded user comments and manage workflow.
4Retail’s Discussions can replace tradition emails, making all information accessible from a central repository without the need to sort through outdated emails to find the latest document version and the agreed upon action. 4Retail’s on demand collaborative solution helps avoid misunderstandings and costly errors and reduces administration time and costly errors.