5 Retail Supply Chain Challenges and How To Use Low-Code To Overcome Them

In recent years, many businesses across numerous different industries have faced prevailing retail supply chain issues. Evolving consumer expectations and market trends have made retail supply chains more unpredictable than ever before. However, these challenges can result in a loss of efficiency, productivity and ultimate profitability for modern businesses. Therefore, businesses must recognize the value of low-code enterprise application development tools to identify and address various retail supply chain challenges.

Low-code is defined as a graphic approach to enterprise application and software development that provides users with user-friendly drag-and-drop tools, integration tools, agility features and better security. Research indicates that the global low-code platform market is forecasted to generate a revenue of $187 billion by the year 2030, with a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 31.1%.

Low-code technology can help businesses access real-time data analytics that can facilitate more informed decision-making processes, identify inefficient business processes and potential vulnerabilities in the supply chain, design and automate various organizational workflows, build powerful and high-functioning enterprise applications that can improve communication between various intermediaries in the retail supply chain and much more.

Retail Supply Chain Challenges That Low-Code Technology Can Help Address:

1) Growing E-Commerce Demands

Businesses with e-commerce consumer channels are expected to keep track of and satisfy consumer expectations in terms of rapid delivery options. Studies have shown that 57% of companies believe that supply chain management provides them with a competitive edge, hence enabling them to develop their business processes and operations further. Consumers often never purchase a product that requires multiple weeks or even days for shipments if there is an alternate option for same-day delivery. However, it can be extremely difficult for businesses to have available inventory at all times to provide consumers with rapid delivery options. This means that your business could potentially be at risk for reduced customer satisfaction and consequent profitability.

Therefore, low-code platforms can help retailers and distributors overcome these supply chain challenges by constantly providing real-time insights about the status of deliveries and available inventory. Low-code development platforms can help your business develop powerful solutions that can connect drivers with consumers, establish automated communication channels, create user-friendly customer portals and much more.

2) Lack Of Transportation Visibility

Increased communication with businesses and drivers can help significantly improve transportation visibility. By improving communication and collaboration with transportation vendors, both employees and customers will be able to access real-time insights into the flow of your organization’s supply chain processes.

Low-code can not only help businesses gain more visibility into shipment processes, delivery delays and much more but can also facilitate more effective warehouse staff planning, workload volume management and risk avoidance. Furthermore, low-code tools can also enable both employees and customers to access real-time data insights regarding the status of deliveries and other supply chain information.

3) Digital Transformation

As digital technology continues to evolve at an exponential rate, implementing effective digital transformation initiatives is now more important than ever before for all organizations. According to a recent study conducted by Gartner, approximately 91% of businesses are currently engaged in some form of digital transformation initiative. However, it can be extremely difficult to design an effective digital transformation initiative with scarce organizational resources and traditional development methods.

Data-driven businesses must prioritize digital transformation to keep up with evolving consumer expectations and market trends. Low-code development can help your business leverage the power of drag-and-drop tools, visual modeling features, instant deployment, security and much more to ultimately make digital transformation initiatives much more effective. Low-code digital transformation initiatives can also enable your business to overcome various supply chain challenges by automating various aspects of supply chain management such as monitoring warehouse space, analyzing available inventory and automatically sending updates to stakeholders.

4) Lack of Efficiency

Retail supply chains can often be vulnerable to unforeseen delays and hindrances. While some supply chain issues such as container shortages, unavailable resources, vendor disputes and much more may be inevitable to a certain extent; low-code technology can help businesses reduce the risk of delays to help maximize efficiency and productivity.

Low-code application development platforms can help your businesses avoid potential bottlenecks in internal business processes that could reduce the efficiency of retail supply chain cycles. Low-code can also automate various manual and repetitive workflows such as inventory planning, vendor management and warehousing. This can not only optimize and streamline various time-consuming organizational tasks but can also enable employees to work on higher-level, more intellectually stimulating business processes.

5) Recognizing Shifts In Demand

In recent years, changes in demand have become increasingly dynamic and uncertain. Therefore, businesses must be aware of potential demand shifts and adjust their retail supply changes to reflect demand spikes or unavailable supply.

Therefore, low-code development platforms can enable your business to connect numerous different data sources with enterprise resource planning solutions to make strategic supply and demand analysis processes much more efficient and effective. This will enable businesses to preemptively note shifts in demand, hence facilitating more informed, data-driven decision-making as well as ultimately improving supply chain management as a whole.

Planet Crust – Streamline and Optimize Retail Supply Chain Processes With Low-Code:

The state of current retail supply chain processes is now more uncertain than ever before. Therefore, it can be extremely difficult for modern businesses to keep track of evolving customer expectations and market trends without sacrificing efficiency, productivity or profitability. However, low-code application development platforms can empower businesses to tackle and overcome these challenges without having to sacrifice large amounts of time or scarce organizational resources.

Corteza, created by Planet Crust, is a 100% open-source low-code platform that can provide businesses with responsive application user interfaces, inclusive design and accessibility, role-based access controls, advanced search functionality, data harmonization, API connectivity, cloud-ready architecture and much more. Corteza can also enable users to connect to various third-party data sources, build an unlimited number of enterprise applications, create complex automated workflows and seamlessly integrate numerous enterprise applications.

Try a trial now so that your business can take advantage of the wide variety of benefits of low-code technology to overcome various retail supply chain challenges.