For the past several years, we at RSR have been calling supply chain “the next big thing. ” Why is this? Because regardless of what topic we’re studying – the store, merchandising, digital channels – retailers continually cite “inventory, ” “inventory accuracy ” and inventory-related issues as the biggest challenges they face in trying to meet growing customer demands.

Quite simply: if you don’t know what you have, where it is, or how you can get it, nothing else really matters. Not price, not product mix, not even the shiny stores or sexy mobile sites you’ve managed to convince someone to visit.

So when we recently launched our annual supply chain survey, the first thing we wanted to know is how are retailers progressing with “the next big thing “?

Right off the bat, they tell us their confidence in their ability to trust the KPIs surrounding their inventory is – at best – about 50/50.

When we examine that same data by performance level, we can see Retail Winners have already invested more time, energy, and technology in being able to say “I have confidence in where that product might be “: they have far greater confidence at virtually every node on the retailer-to-consumer supply chain.

These data points alone help underscore the perfect storm of events that create the need for this document – which will publish later this month – to be what it will become: a highly prescriptive tool intended to help retailers understand:

• The severity of the matter
• How the best retailers are making strides
• What technologies will help most, and
• How we sincerely hope 2018 will be a turning point year for supply chain.

With the majority of retailers only being asked to fulfill orders across multiple channels for 10 years or less, we understand the need to put things in perspective. Unfortunately, with Amazon and other channel giants spending those same 10+ years investing heavily in the type of R&D that enables them to fulfill orders in seemingly impossible ways in nearly no time at all, this doesn’t mean the pressure is off. We reiterate here something we say whenever we are asked: the sky is not falling and retail is not “dead “, but it’s time for retailers who want to live to see another decade to get on their horse.

Overall, the trends that have been developing in Supply Chain for years are only getting stronger – there really aren’t any new surprises.

And while anxiety has gone up, Retail Winners are the only ones doing something about it. Winners are essentially doing things in two, very specific areas: visibility and forecasting. But as the report will certainly show: even they have far to go.

While we often see concern about what the competition is up to in our survey responses, we see it more in this year’s supply chain study than in most other reports. Sometimes that’s a bad thing. But because supply chain really is “the next big thing, ” in this case – it is absolutely justified.

We hope you’ll be interested in the full report – we’ll let you know as soon as it publishes.