SPI - Retail Insights Blog

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

VCF Follow Up

Well, I'm back from sunny South Florida where, per my last post, I attended the VCF Spring Conference. It was a worthwhile experience, and a lot of great retail organizations were there. Cabela's, Pep Boys, TJ Max, just to name a few.

At VCF, I co-presented during a breakout session on vendor relations with Hudson's Bay Company's Financial Director. Hbc also walked through the various challenges its organization faced and the opportunities that it has capitalized on within the vendor management space. For my part, I highlighted Tradeflow Optimization^SM, an SPI solution, in order to hopefully give listeners an idea about how to put some of Hbc's recommendations into motion.

Main areas of focus included ways retailers can automate some of the manual touch points that occur between themselves and trading partners-things like vendor creation, master vendor agreements, deal management and other processes within vendor management. From what we heard, retailers saw a lot of value in that discussion.

An interesting thing that struck me during our session was that retailers were very willing to express their pain points, and that many of them (as we suspected) were experiencing the same ones. I heard multiple people in the audience mention moving select processes, such as AP Inquiry, to a self-service model, and allowing vendors to access information anywhere, anytime through web-based applications. Providing vendors the ability to set up new items with the retailer came up a couple of times, too.

Also, retailers expressed interest in how they could increase visibility and accountability, and we were sought out after the presentation to provide more examples, case studies and ideas on this, as well.

All in all, VCF was a wonderful event. I would strongly encourage you � if you're in a vendor-facing role within your organization, to look into the organization and stop by to see us at the summer or fall conferences.