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.