Urban Outfitters adopts supply chain analytics
By Retail Technology | Monday September 9 2013
Detailed visibility into variable ticketing supply lead times accelerating speed to market for global retail brand owner
US-based fashion and lifestyle retailer, Urban Outfitters, has been named as an early adopter of a new web-based analytics product designed to provide detailed visibility into variable ticketing supply lead times.Developed by FineLine Technologies, FastTrak Analytics is the newest addition to the FastTrak platform, an internet-based software package for order processing, tracking and management of the ticketing function.
The new analytical reporting tool will provide Urban Outfitters and FineLine’s base of 200 brand name retail customers with three core reports: order turnaround time, which calculates the average time between receipt of an order by FineLine and shipment of tickets; order received time, as the average time between receipt of an order by FineLine and delivery of tickets to vendors; and orders shipped to country, as the average time between receipt of an order by FineLine and delivery of tickets to vendors in a specific country.
Understanding supply chain needs
“FineLine understands our supply chain and is the first supplier to provide us with real-time reporting for both shipping and received-at-vendor performance metrics. This real-time information helps us to better manage our ticketing supply chain,” said Jay Hallett, vendor relations manager at Urban Outfitters.
The publicly traded US retailer owns and operates over 400 retail locations across five retail brands: Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, Free People, Terrain and BHLDN.
The technology vendor added that, to develop FastTrak Analytics, it had to devise an automated system to analyse and report real-time data in fine detail, including shipping and delivery times from its four manufacturing facilities to over 15,000 vendors within retail customers’ supply chains.
For an example of the precision of the metrics, FineLine found that its average order turnaround time on over 300,000 orders shipped so far this year was 2.33 business days, and the average delivery time to vendors around the world was 5.30 business days. Delivery time to vendors includes the order turnaround time, and so it represents the total time a retailer can expect its tickets and labels to reach its vendors. Many orders ship within the first 24 hours.