In these challenging times for both retailers and many consumer goods manufacturers, you would think both sides would turn to greater collaboration to lower costs and boost sales.
From SCDigest's view, that isn't really happening. Why is that? What are the barriers to collaboration between retailers and their vendors?
That was one of the questions we asked in our recent survey of retailers and manufacturers, leading to our major report on 2018 Benchmark Study of Retailer-Vendor Supply Chain Relationships.
The chart below shows the responses:

As shown in the chart on the next page, retailers believe the biggest barrier is related to a lack of actionable
data, with an average score of 4.1, on a 1 to 7 scale, with 1 being the least barrier and 7 the highest barrier.
That was just ahead of the lack of knowledge/skill on the part of trading partners (4.2) and then the general
level of interest in collaboration by trading partners (4.1).
On the vendor side, lack of data was also seen as the largest barrier to collaboration (4.5), followed by a
tie at 4.3 across trading partner skill, general interest in collaboration, and questions about how to share
the gains.
Interestingly, as was also true in the previous study, both retailers (2.8) and vendors (3.2) rate their own
skills in collaboration as low barriers to improvement – in other words,
It's not us, it's the other guy."
The excellent full report can be downloaded here.
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