Consumer Goods supply chains are burdened with such challenges as changing consumer demands, rapid product developments, global expansion and consolidation, a demanding retail channel, erosion of brand loyalty, leveraging new product categories and time-to-market pressures. Added to those challenges are difficulties in growing a discerning consumer base in the face of stiff competition, coupled with the increasing dominance of big-box retailers and regulatory constraints.

As firms look for ways to increase market share, maximize profits and create a strong brand identity, they need to rely on an optimized supply chain to flawlessly manage their fulfillment process efficiently and cost effectively to attain a competitive advantage with consumers as well as retailers. They must respond to customer orders rapidly and with a high degree of accuracy while maintaining just the right balance of inventory levels to meet retail demand without stock-outs. In order to avoid unnecessary levels of inventory, and its associated carrying costs, manufacturers must forge collaborative relationships with the retail channel and jointly manage the replenishment process. This is critical because i f a brand supplied by a manufacturer or distributor is unavailable, consumers may switch to a rival brand, abandoning expensively generated brand loyalty.

Aware supply chain execution solution from Exactus includes key features for the consumer goods industry such as standards compliance, RFID functionality, value-added services, wave management, cross-docking and scalable SKU handling. It can help you reduce operating costs, improve supply chain efficiencies, reduce inventory and shorten cycle times in order to meet the exacting demands of consumers whilst driving improved levels of revenues and margins. To meet the complexity of your inbound goods processing and fulfillment requirements, such key features as directed picking, bulk and consolidated picking, rules based picking for case, pallet and piece picks, task interleaving and ASN processing are available as part of our solution.

Mergers and acquisitions in the Consumer Goods industry, driven by cost efficiencies, economies of scale and potential for increasing market share, pose additional challenges for consumer goods manufacturers with regards to integrating disparate systems and rationalizing brands, channels and customer base information. Awares standards based open architecture lends itself to seamlessly integrate various incongruent systems to effectively handle dissemination of information across retailers and manufacturers for more effective collaboration related to planning, forecasting and replenishment. The collaborative capabilities of Aware allow you to more closely cooperate with your suppliers and customers to aggressively manage pricing and promotions in order to compete successfully. By identifying sales patterns in real time and preventing stock-outs, you can grow your revenues, increase your margins and maintain brand image. The web interface of Aware lets you leverage internet technologies to harmonize internal and trading partner processes and dramatically improve your procurement and supplier collaboration capabilities.

Mandates from big-box retailers like Wal Mart and Target for product and customer traceability require many consumer goods manufacturers and suppliers to adopt new technologies like RFID. Awares RFID2Go solution can help you rapidly embrace these new technologies not only to quickly respond to the requirements of super retailers, but also to truly leverage the technology itself in order to improve process efficiencies, achieve ROI and gain a competitive edge.

Aware can accommodate value-added services such a garment tags, co-packing and price ticketing to process store-ready merchandise. Efficient order consolidation and load optimization strategies can be leveraged with Aware to reduce costs.

The auto-alert feature lets you proactively manage events and handle exceptions. Notifications can be sent to appropriate managers and trading partners who can react appropriately when a scheduled event or exception occurs.

Aware provides a comprehensive set of visibility tools including real-time performance metrics to enable you to take informed management decisions regarding inventory levels, order status and fulfillment progress.