WELCOME TO SILKROUTE

We are a passionate team of designers, artificial intelligence scientists and software engineers with tremendous industry knowledge of manufacturing, wholesale distribution and retail. We live for solving big problems. Our industry specific predictive and prescriptive analytics platform creates immense operational and strategic value for our customers. Our customer footprint is global and growing. Applied machine learning, business process & workflow automation and enterprise mobility is woven into the fabric of every thing we build. We offer a unique risk free rapid implementation and integration approach for our customers to enjoy our advanced analytics solutions.

SKYLIGHT

(Sense Demand + Stock Smart + Sell More) ^ See Everything

SkyLight is a robust vendor managed inventory (VMI) SaaS solution. SkyLight receives POS data from world's top retailers and manages many product categories for our supplier, wholesaler and distributor customers.

SkyLight optimizes all aspects of the retail demand chain with a mission to sense demand, stock smart, sell more and see everything. SkyLight key functionality includes; new product introduction, demand sensing and shaping using POS and other sources, demand driven replenishment, assortment optimization and reverse logistics. SkyLight has superior demand forecasting, perpetual inventory management and assortment optimization and many more algorithms built by our data scientists at its very core. SkyLight is built on the atomic level foundation of a unique item-location combination. SkyLight is a high performance rapidly deployable and easy to use solution with a global and growing customer footprint.

SilkRoute provides a turnkey SkyLight VMI as a Service (VMIaaS) option leveraging our vendor managed inventory center of excellence. This option is very popular with many of our customers.

VENDOR MANAGED INVENTORY

SILKROUTE RETAIL INVENTORY MANAGEMENT SERVICES

Based on your requirements the SilkRoute VMI team will implement and manage processes ranging from new product planning and forecasting to store returns and markdown identification. Our functional service offering will include but will not be limited to the following:

  • New product forecasting and allocation
  • Forecast analysis and tuning
  • Forecasting and replenishment management
  • Promotional forecast and allocation management
  • Store assortment optimization
  • Returns management

Any effective inventory management solution requires an optimized blend of technology, processes, and people. Each element is critical in creating a stable foundation. With more than a decade of experience in serving the world’s largest retail supply chains, SilkRoute brings proven business processes and experienced personnel to our customers.

As an objective third-party we are able to draw upon our process and technology assets to optimize inventory and supply chain trade-offs on behalf of our clients without prejudice. Our approach is based on the goals and objectives of our customers, expressed through service-level agreements and objectives. As a result our processes link our experienced VMI team members with the business and operational objectives of our customers. Rather than being simply custodians of the VMI systems, our personnel work collaboratively with customers to execute critical initiatives related to inventory management and subsequent working capital optimization.

KEY DIFFERENTIATORS OF SERVICES
  • New product forecasting and allocation
  • Forecast analysis and tuning
  • Forecasting and replenishment management
  • Promotional forecast and allocation management
  • Store assortment optimization
  • Returns management

VENDOR MANAGED INVENTORY CENTERS OF EXCELLENCE

Product Management

The SilkRoute Product Management CoE is staffed by professionals with significant retail buying and promotions management experience. Because Product Management is about managing the most volatile portion of the product life cycle, experienced resources are a necessity. Our product management staff will work with you and your on-site VMI representative to manage functions including:

  • New product forecasting and allocation
  • New product replenishment and inventory management
  • Promotions inventory planning
  • Promotions supply chain planning and execution
  • Promotions assessment

Supply Chain Planning

The Supply Chain Planning Center of Excellence manages the integration points in the supply chain enabling each stakeholder to optimize their inventories and manage their order frequencies. The SilkRoute Supply Chain Planning team provides comprehensive supply-side forecasting and replenishment support maximizing the leverage of every inventory dollar. Supply Chain Planning personnel focus on the following functional offerings:

  • Distribution center inventory optimization
  • Manufacturer service level optimization
  • Optimizing product flow by contribution
  • Demand-linked inventory management
  • DC replenishment analytics
  • Lead time analysis and tuning
  • Returns analysis/optimization

Demand Planning and Forecasting

The Demand Planning and Forecasting CoE is focused on managing store-inventory and replenishment. This group brings nearly a decade of experience in store-level forecasting and replenishment experience across the home entertainment categories. The Demand Planning team will work with your inventory planners to insure optimal use of inventory budget dollars down to the shelf level. We will optimize around your targets for in-store on-shelf availability as well as inventory productivity and will manage the following work streams:

  • Forecast analysis and optimization
  • Order strategy analysis and optimization
  • Seasonal profile optimization
  • Inventory availability analysis
  • Inventory productivity analysis
  • Order review and release
  • Open-to-buy monitoring/management

MODULES

The iBI module contains canned reports of master and transactional data such as orders, sales and inventory. Users can filter, sort, group and export. For more analytical reporting we use Jasper. iBI provides high visibility and single source of the truth of the data.

With iAssort, each store is dynamically replenished with the best selling items within the store. The user specifies the items for the assortment using included items, excluded items, and even specifies the location of the item. In iAssort, the user can create assortments customized by store. The tool recommends the best products based on sales ranking and then always replenishes the next best item in the assortment up to the assortment's capacity.

Inventory management on a surgical level analyze inventory to aid in pinpointing shrink and mis-ships. This Inventory management module analyzes inventory discrepancies to aid in pinpointing stock shrink and mis-ships, so that red flags can be noted by the buyer

The iForecast definition utilizes various numbers of forecasting algorithms to calculate an accurate order for replenishment. The "best fit" technique for instance, combines the entire catalog of forecasting algorithms and picks the one with the least amount of forecasting error. Three types of models are utilized here: the new release model, the seasonal model (52 weekly plotted graph points) and a promotional model (forecasting in the rules of particular promotions). In addition, there is "Automated Replenishment" which is calculated using lead times, safety stock, planned sales days, and review time (based on time between order cycles).

The iPlan module is used for space planning. The user can load fixture information inputting widths, heights, minimums, and maximums within the store's footprint. After the information is acquired, the iPlan algorithms calculate a minimum and maximum, and apply those minimums and maximums to desired order sources to satisfy the presentation requirements of the store's footprint.

The iOrder/iLocation module allows users to review, adjust and release order lines, making them available for their organization's warehousing systems to process. Also within this module is the ability to track the orders lines through the order life cycle from warehouse to shelf. Orders created via iForecast, iBuy, iAssort, Grouping Min/Max , iLocation (SkyLight's manual ordering module) may all be forced to the review screen within iOrder for review. iLocation's convenient order placement either by search and select or excel import allows the user to assign order source, business rules and special instructions on the fly. SkyLight's iOrder module provides unmatched flexibility while ordering products.

Skylight SAAS Delivers Results

Reduced Out-of-Stock Ratios5-40% Reduced Inventory Levels15-55% Improved Forecasting12-33% Reduced Shipping Costs10-16% Reduced Inventory Overstocks24-72% Forecast Accuraciesup to 83% Reduced Total Cost of Ownership12-30%

SPEED TO VALUE

SkyLight is built from day one as a true SaaS solution offered on a monthly subscription basis. SkyLight provides our customers with a flexible and low-cost means of implementing a complete wholesale/retail supply chain management suite capable of handling all business processes and workflows in an integrated fashion.

SkyLight customers are suppliers, wholesalers and distributors who are implementing Vendor Managed Inventory programs with their retail customers or aspire take their current VMI capabilities to a whole new level of operational and strategic excellence.

Efficient B2B upstream and down stream integration services provide SkyLight customers with incredible speed-to-value. These integration services come to you at no cost during our rapid implementation phase. Most customers begin operating their VMI supply chain in production on SkyLight within 30-45 days of initiating the implementation.

NO RISK IMPLEMENTATIONS

SkyLight SaaS platform provides uncommon scalability. Our customer portfolio includes some of the world's largest suppliers, wholesalers, distributors and retailers and yet our solution is priced to attract customers in the SMB segment equally well.

Speed to Market is important than ever for our customers. We don't waste our customer's time with powerpoint slides. We provision SkyLight SaaS platform for them in a day. We load our customer's sales and inventory historical data and configure their business rules in SkyLight within a week. We provide a no risk option to our customers to implement SkyLight. Our customers are delighted with the results.

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