2020 State of Wholesale Distribution Supply Chain Report

Learn the Supply Chain Strategies that
Your Peers are Implementing in 2020

To better understand the challenges facing the wholesale distribution supply industry and how best-of-breed players are thinking about solving them, we decided to ask them. For the third year in a row, Blue Ridge conducted a survey of wholesale distributors to better understand their plans for managing supply chain chaos.

We asked many of the same questions as last year to provide a year-over-year comparison showing the evolution of the industry and how new technology including Machine Learning is shaping supply chain business practices.

Key findings of the study include:

• Businesses continue to struggle with supply chain management and understanding how to optimize inventory on-hand to meet shifting consumer demands. How to best plan inventory replenishment and forecasting continues to be complicated by uncertainties out of their control – including transportation/warehouse capacity, upstream supplier constraints, tariffs, ecommerce competition and price transparency.
• No matter what the challenge or cause for concern, the typical response continues to be holding more inventory, then discounting the excess, which is hindering revenue growth and margins.
• This year, we see new product introductions becoming more of a supply chain planning challenge, moving up to the top-three this year
• Advanced supply chain analytics and technologies to improve S&OP processes/collaboration, as well as machine learning tools, are gaining traction as part of a comprehensive forecasting and supply chain management strategy.