CRP - Continuous Replenishment system - the purpose of this system is to streamline the logistic system, reducing inventory, and improve overall ordering and service quality for the channel customers.
EDI - Electronic data interchange - P&G system involves a lot of data transfers from their retailers to P&G on warehouse product shipments to each store. This system also paved a way to determine the quality of the products to be shipped.
OBS - Ordering Shipping Billing - Purpose of OSB is to increase the level of service required by the customers so that P&G could better focus on servicing channel customers which included pricing, ordering, shipping, and separate credit systems.
ECR - Efficient …show more content…
How did the oldest total order management process work? What improvements are made to the old process? How important are the new information technologies in P&G's efforts?
P&G's total order management process was clearly not working to its optional and was not doing any good to the company. For instance, the promotion process and the pricing were such a mess and misleading which led to customer dissatisfaction due to the difference in prices. The most inefficient part of this system was the shipping department where manual carrier assignment and product availability check at shipment points was totally a disaster and led to decrease in on time shipments to 55%.
Revamping the order management system such as the development of common unique databases for product-related data, value pricing, ever-evolving technologies like EDI/CRP all combined together will increase the overall efficiency in P&G.
When it comes to new technologies, for a company like P&G of such a high scale, holding a new Information Technology is very crucial because maintaining, accessing the inventory levels across the stores would be difficult, time-consuming and inaccurate most of the times. With new technologies in place maintaining, setting up the inventory levels is much more streamlined and in the most cases, it is accurate. Also, with CRP in place, the coordination of P&G and the distributors are mostly done through technologies which in turn simplifies P&G's forecasting and pricing …show more content…
What are some intangible benefits of such a large business process improvement?
One of the key decisions taken by P&G was to introduce the continuous replenishment system through several retailers with whom they were working with. The focus of this decision is to help many distributors prevent losing their money by holding too much of inventory. Also, by utilizing CRP P&G decreased their cost for the company and for the distributors which in turn helps in increasing the company's market share in the industry. Implementing a large-scale revamp of what P&G has done is not something very feasible for a mid-sized manufacturer as they might not hold different brands like P&G. Since P&G held different brands, it was able to integrate many such brands into one product category which was later fell under the responsibility of the category manager while the brand managers were accountable for advertising and promotions. This way of single tree integration P&G was able to choose and eliminate the weaker brands.
4. To what extent has P&G changed its strategy to take advantage of