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Category Archives: SCI News

SCI’s 2018 Omni-Channel Retail Leadership Summit

On April 19th, 2018 SCI hosted its 3rd Omni-Channel Retail Leadership Summit in Toronto featuring speakers and attendees from influential organizations in the Canadian retail environment.  The speakers discussed the state of retail in Canada, e-commerce and wholesale success in Canada, the influence of Amazon, shipping models, cyber security, and other pressing topics.  Get some vital answers by downloading the Summit materials.

See below some key messages presented by the retail and e-commerce industry experts at the Summit:

Andrew Nichols

 Dave Mack

Andrew Nichols, BioSteel: 

“Our success story began with our founder generating consumers’ support and awareness first, and big marketing activations coming later.”

“BioSteel customers demand an authentic connection with our brand.”

“We need the ability to scale when customer forecasts are inaccurate or non-existent.”

“Ecommerce is the fastest growing part of our business, and it’s breaking stuff everywhere!”

“The supply chain pressures we experienced came from managing manufacturing capacity, trying to accurately forecast demand, develop our distribution partnership, getting product delivered to consumers – all while growing fast.  In our case, when combined with the hyper growth these factors become even more of a challenge.”

“The four strategic pillars of our strategy for sustained growth were Right product, right price, right merchandising, and staff awareness.”

Dave Mack, SCI: 

“If your Amazon strategy is “wait and see” it might as well be “wait and suffer”.

“Five Amazon Strategies that I’m seeing right now are:

  • Kick Start your new Products
  • Leverage their Traffic to your advantage
  • Target their Weaknesses
  • Monitor them and Leverage their learnings

If you’d like to learn more about what these strategies could look like, reach out and I’ll send you illustrations of each.”

“If Amazon has not yet impacted your product category, they will.”

“When I surveyed the group of over 50 Omni-Channel Retail leaders and asked them to describe their Amazon strategy, here’s what they said:

  • 46% – Leveraging Amazon
  • 30% – Competing with Amazon
  • 18% – Partnering with Amazon
  • 6% – No real strategy at this time”

 

Kyle Pretsch Jeremiah Tonn

Kyle Pretsch, Lucky Brand: 

“Culture change happens when you light a company on FIRE!”

“For omni-channel launch to be successful, review the tactics and adapt to the changing business on a bi-weekly basis, not quarterly.  Quarterly is just too slow!”

“When launching omni-channel, to achieve the full effects and learning it is important to do 3 things: make all inventory available, at all stores possible, and do both quickly. More availability means more sales for the same cost.”

 

Jeremiah Tonn, Marsh and McLennan:

“The average data breach costs is $255 per record compromised. The average cost for an organization to deal with a Data Breach is $5.8M.”

“For card-not-present (CNP) types of transactions, e.g. payments made over internet, phone orders, mail orders, the fraud growth is currently overpassing the growth of sales.”

“Wherever your data is, it’s your responsibility. Employee misuse of data, lost data, cyber extortion, inadvertent disclosure of private information, business use of private information are some examples of the breaches that lead to class action lawsuits.”

Michael Leblanc Brian Beck

Michael Leblanc, M.E.LeBlanc & Company: 

“Retail is changing…  as it always has and will continue to do forever.”

“Conversational Commerce” or voice activated shopping through devices such as Google Home or Amazon Echo – it is going to be the next big thing, and you heard it here first!”

“The eco fees that we see in the Electronics space will likely soon be something the Apparel space will be facing as well.”

“Canadian retail performance is curiously strong. Latest Canadian numbers tell the story.”

Brian Beck, Guidance: 

“65% of consumers would buy from a brand or seller they never heard of before!”

“Ignoring online marketplaces is not a strategy.”

“Amazon is the new Google for product searches.”

 

 

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 SCI Technology Leadership Summit 2018: Key Messages from Industry Experts

On March 29th, 2018 SCI held their first Technology Leadership Summit in Toronto featuring speakers and attendees from influential organizations in the Canadian technology environment.  The speakers discussed the Internet-of-Things, evolution of hardware manufacturing and deployment, workforce challenges, depot repair options, and other pressing topics.  Get some vital answers by downloading the Summit content below.

 

Fill the form to download the Summit content:

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See below some key messages presented by the industry experts at the Summit:

 Timothy

Pavel Shcherbin, Schulich school of Business: “Do you think AI will affect your supply chain? From chat bots to placing purchasing requests, to receiving/filing invoices and payment orders, to report writing – it’s already here”

 

 

Timothy Schnare, Onx Enterprise: “The Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionizing the supply chain management. Mobile computing, analytics, and cloud services fueled by IoT are changing the logistics operations. Will your company transform in time?”

 

Marc Domenic
Marc Mondesir, Dell EMC: “Together with IT and Security, Workforce is one of the three areas that help drive Digital Transformation. While typically resulting in an increase in productivity and a vast reduction in TCO, transformation requires a shift in costs and resources from “low value” devices and OS related tasks to “high value” apps and data related activities.”

 

Domenic Creo, CompuCom: “The end users are changing the game for IT services: they want a personal experience and a 24/7 help desk. You can’t have a “one size fits all” and expect it to work.”

 

 

 

 Sam
Peter Collier, SCI: “The expectation is not going to be for perfection, but for excellence: if my cell phone isn’t connecting to the internet, I will use another device until it comes back. The real expectation is that it will come back fairly quickly.”

 

Sam Mikles, Flash Global: “89% of companies see themselves as competing primarily on customer experience, and the service supply chain is specifically designed to help you deliver on promises to your customers, globally”

 

 
Catherine Evans, Marsh and McLennan: “What cyber threats do we face? How good our controls are? What is the potential impact on my organization?  Get people from all aspects of your business into one room and have them define what they are worried about from a cyber risk perspective.”

 

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2018 SCI Annual Meeting: Focus. Excellence. Future.

On Tuesday March 20th, the company came together for an unforgettable day of networking, participating, learning, and celebrating – the 2018 SCI Annual Meeting. The annual event got everyone aligned around the guiding principles of Focus, Excellence, Future.

What lies ahead for SCI?  How we plan to make our teams even better?   How we plan to help our employees become even better as leaders? The SCI executive team answered these questions while our team members got a chance to reconnect with their peers from across the country, meet new people, recognize the Continuous Improvement and Safety award winners, and have some fun while we learn new things together.


Click above to watch a video: 33 SCI facilities won the Safety award


Click above to watch a video: 16 Continuous Improvement award winners


Click above to watch a video: The SCI Award of Excellence winner: Wendy Leblanc

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SCI: We’ll Make You Even Better

Watch the video to find out why clients in omni-channel retail, technology, healthcare and wellness industries choose SCI as their 3PL partner, and how SCI’s supply chain solutions help mid-market companies grow their business. See SCI’s supply chain capabilities such as e-commerce order fulfillment, promo materials insertion, gift wrapping, packing and kitting, processing of returns, technology products configuration and repair, healthcare medical devices and supplies distribution.

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Los Angeles based retailer JohnPaulRichard partners with SCI for Canadian distribution and VAS

Toronto (Ontario), April 27, 2017 – Los Angeles based women’s clothing retailer, JohnPaulRichard, has partnered with SCI for Canadian product distribution and retail value added services. JohnPaulRichard will rely on SCI’s retail logistics, wholesale intelligence, and general supply chain expertise for a seamless introduction to the Canadian market.

JohnPaulRichard VAS“SCI had reacted fast to our value added services and distribution needs” said Robert Hirsh, Chief Operating Officer at JohnPaulRichard, Inc. / Fever Clothing. “Seeing how quickly and effectively the team comes up with solutions, we can confidently say that, if anything happens, SCI has the capabilities and a plethora of unique services to ensure that our business continues to run smoothly in Canada.”

SCI is now handling the Canada wide distribution of JohnPaulRichard’s product as soon as it arrives in Vancouver from Asia. By conducting quality assurance testing, SCI will ensure that JohnPaulRichard’s products comply with the expectations of their Canadian retailers.

“The ability to customize solutions and go the extra-mile is what makes us a strong partner” said Dave Mack, Vice President of Omni-Channel Retail at SCI. “We have put in place the value-added services that complement the fundamental distribution processes for JohnPaulRichard’s products”.

JohnPaulRichard Inc. (JPR), founded in Los Angeles in 1996, has the mission to design moderate and better updated women’s apparel at affordable prices. Fashion minded and customer conscious, JohnPaulRichard has always made it a priority to put quality at the forefront of its business. With over 20 years of sourcing and manufacturing in Asia, JPR has established lasting partnerships with the top factories in the industry. The JohnPaulRichard and FEVER(Better Sportwear Division solely owned by John Paul Richard) lines offers a full range of classifications, including bottoms, dresses, tops, jackets and sweaters in all fabrications. JPR also produces special sizes, plus and petite. Today JPR and FEVER can be found in most major department stores and Specialty Stores around the U.S. under the JohnPaulRichard and FEVER brands, and now in Canada.

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Value Added Services – Partnering with the Right 3PL

In today’s competitive business environments, retailers, technology manufacturers and healthcare businesses are expecting more from their third-party logistics providers.

To meet these new needs, 3PL providers like SCI provide value added services (VAS), to help their clients reduce costs through a variety of solutions, including the ability to customize orders, maintain product quality, and get your product to the end consumer faster. Often the value-added services being offered by the supply chain provider become the determining factor in vendor selection.

Broken down by business segment, value added services that may be important to your organization include:

Retail & Ecommerce

  • Assembly, specialized kitting services, price stickers, labeling, and repackaging, gift wrapping, garment on hangers (GOH), Acceptance Quality Limit (AQL) inspection, apparel alterations and retail returns processing.

Technology Companies

  • New equipment deployments & installations, field service, technical support, diagnostics, repair, help desk and ticket management, parts salvaging, disposal & recycling.

Healthcare & Life Science

  • Kitting, consumable & medical device home delivery, medical equipment installation, set-up and equipment testing, technical support, decontamination and secure destruction.

 

Value-Added Services (VAS) for Apparel Retailers from SCI.

Here are the top 3 reasons to select a supply chain provider that has experience implementing a variety of value added services:

1. Changing Customer Needs

At the moment, you may simply require product storage and transportation. However, your supply chain needs may change based on shifts in consumer requirements. If your 3PL partner cannot provide the new services, this can create a disruption in your supply chain, such as having to find another service provider to fill in the gap, or trying to create the additional capabilities in-house

2. Dealing with Unforeseen Issues

Having access to many different services can be very important if unexpected issues arise, necessitating additional services before your final product goes to the market (e.g. apparel that needs dry-cleaning, or a mobile device that needs testing and repair).  When a business must employ an additional 3rd party on short notice, solving the issue can impact the entire business. However, if your 3PL partner already provides the required service, implementing the solution is straight forward and eliminates the extra cost incurred with other options.

3. Trust the Service Experts

If your 3PL partner offers broad value added service capabilities, it’s likely that they are providing these services to other businesses, improving their expertise over time. They have already gone through the process of setting up, implementing and executing the services, repeatedly. Experimenting with service providers with unproven capabilities, or trying to implement a solution in-house can lead to a loss of time and money, and most importantly, to an inadequate experience for your customers.

 

SCI provides a wide variety of logistics value added services designed specifically for Retailers, Tech Companies, and Healthcare related businesses.

Learn more about any of our value added services, or contact our logistics experts via our Ask an Expert form.

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