The retail industry is confronted by many unique challenges such as increased globalization, ever changing customer behavior, growing customer service expectations, complexities of expanding distribution and supply channels and increased competition. In order to boost profit margins, companies need to maintain low inventory levels while ensuring high product availability. Improved forecast accuracy is required to safeguard against lost sales and brand/image erosion that can result from stockouts. As customers become more knowledgeable about products and competitors, they are increasingly predisposed to shopping across retailers. Driving a compelling and positive consumer experience is therefore an imperative that can help improve customer loyalty and retention and result in higher sales. With shortened product lifecycles, companies must manage product transitions with improved promotional planning, better forecasting for seasonal products and timely markdowns for slow selling products. Longer procurement lead times require close collaboration with suppliers to gain an end-to-end visibility and respond to any changes in the supply chain. In order to achieve operational excellence, companies need to look at more effective ways to improve sales, eliminate costs from the supply chains and proactively manage events by collaborating with suppliers.

Exactus offers the Aware supply chain execution solution that can empower you to meet retail industry specific needs with several advanced features such as single pass putaway of multiple SKUs, efficient vehicle and user travel strategies to reduce labor and increase throughput, task interleaving, allocation by order type/status and automated slotting for case and piece picking. Aware lets you optimally manage your high piece pick environment by improving the efficiency in your receiving, picking and putaway processes. Shipments can be received through multiple levels of ASNs and you can pre-determine allocation of shipments in order to improve merchandise flow-through in your facility. You can drive down the inventory levels in your supply chain by achieving global inventory visibility to help determine the most suitable fulfillment location. Cross-docking and flow-through let you manage merchandise without stocking. Awares open architecture allows you to interface with your suppliers and merchandising centers to better manage inventories through collaboration.

The business intelligence capabilities of Aware let you manage, analyze and view key business trends and insights for better managerial decision-making. With real-time visibility to key inventory, distribution and performance metrics, you get continuous insight into the location of deliveries and shipments to help you optimize business processes related to your retail operation. Material, labor, and space assets related to inbound and outbound operations can be allocated optimally to realize cost and time savings. You can monitor vendor history and track such attributes as delivery schedule timeliness, quality assurance and damaged goods returns.

The auto-alert feature and advanced event management facilities of Aware let you proactively manage events and handle exceptions. Notifications can be sent to appropriate managers and trading partners when a scheduled event or exception occurs, thereby preventing stockouts and delays related to backorders.

The EPC compliant RFID features of Aware can offer considerable productivity improvements and reduction in costs for retailers by potentially eliminating or reducing manual scanning in receiving operations.

Aware lets you easily manage such value-added services as private labeling, special packing, promotional items, kitting and co-packing to address complex customer-specific fulfillment requirements.