E-Supply and logistics

Introduction

Panda Retail Company is one of the leading food retailers in Saudi Arabia. It was founded in 1978 and later merged with Azizia Company. It was acquired by the Savola group in 1998 and began developing in the retail industry. Its acquisition facilitated its growth and expansion by extending its market share in Saudi Arabia (Robin 2017). Panda Retail Company has several established hypermarkets across different cities in the United Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It extended its operations to Egypt in 2015 after opening the biggest hypermarket in the region. Its headquarters is located in Savola Group HQ.

Panda Retail Company is the largest food retailer in the Middle East and owns over 400 branches of Panda hyper and supermarkets. It also runs Pandati in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and over 400 million customers consume its services annually. Panda retail company earlier dealt with foodstuff, luxury items, garments, and electric appliances. It has since focused on one line of goods i.e., foodstuffs and drinks. It was the first-ever retail company to introduce door-to-door leaflet delivery for its foodstuffs and beverages. It is much known for its high number of employees. It has employed more than 10000 personnel across its global hypermarkets.

The mission\company statement of Panda Retail Company is “Offering reasonably priced quality food, served quickly, in attractive, clean surroundings.” Panda's vision reads, "Give consumers a fair price while ensuring returns to our investors and all stakeholders. Create satisfying work experience for all Savolans. Inspire personal responsibility and enthusiasm for the opportunity.” (Robin 2017). The mission of Panda Retail Company is to the commitment to the social responsibility and working relentlessly to achieve world-class standards of accountability, transparency, and openness towards every stakeholder and build bridges to reach and serve the communities within the operational regions.

Supply Chain Management and Logistics

Supply chain management entails an active and continuous streamlining of a business's supply activities to optimize customer value and gain competitive advantages in the global market. It involves the cooperation between firms to connect customers, suppliers, and other partners to boost efficiency and produce value for the end consumers. Supply chain management activities provide a strategic decision and set up an operational framework for logistical operations (Koufteros et al. 2018). SCM control and link the production, distribution, and supply of the products. It enables companies to minimize costs and deliver goods and services to their customers.

SCM is managed by controlling internal production, private inventories, sales, distribution, and the inventories of company vendors. Supply chain managers’ coordinates planning/strategy, raw materials, manufacturing, return system, delivery, and logistics. SCM makes recommendations on the necessary improvements in quality, productivity, and efficiency of operations. The Panda Retail Company deployed Oracle retail supply chain to optimize the SCM operations and business transactions. Oracle solutions control all the supply, inventory, and sales activities of its hypermarkets, supermarkets, and retail stores across the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Arabia.

Logistics is a component of the supply chain process that majors in planning, implementing, and controlling the efficiency and effectiveness of the forward and reverse flow of products. It coordinates the flow of related information between conveyer and the point of consumption to meet customer's needs (Koufteros et al. 2018). Logistics ensures that customers receive their desired products in time and at their preferred location with the agreed price and quality. Panda Retail Company employs logistics efficiency by providing transportation services to its customers. Online orders are made, and the good is delivered to their preferred place (Mangan & Lalwani 2016). The various hypermarkets, supermarkets, and retail shops provide aftersales service, which includes delivering bulky goods to customers' homes.

E-Logistics and E Supply Chain Management

E-logistics is the logistical process that coordinates everything about the online marketplace. It entails a dynamic set of collaborative technologies and communication computing for transforming essential logistic processes. E-logistics transform logistics processes into customer-based by sharing information, knowledge, and data with supply chain associates (Erceg & Damoska-Sekulowska 2019). The critical components of e-logistics are performance management, cross border functionality, forecasting, cross border functionality, planning, warehouse inventory, and layout.

Panda Retail Company facilitates the success of e-logistics through transparent communication with its customers for returns and deliveries, and proper collaboration with the stakeholders. It has online shops for viewing and ordering products. Payments of the food products are either made on delivery of the goods or down online as before delivery. Panda Retail Company has an online platform for communication with the customers and alerting the companies about dissatisfactions (Shamout & Elayan 2018). The online shops also help in checking product availability and arranging shipments and returns.

E-SCM is the maximization of business operations and value in the entire enterprise right from the suppliers to the consumers. Web technology and e-business concepts are used for both upstream and downstream management of the enterprise. E-SCM coordinates all the business steps right from product design, procurement of raw materials, transport/shipping, distribution, and storage in the relevant warehouses where the customers can access the products. E-SCM cuts the operation cost and integrates the enterprise close to the partners and stakeholders. E-procurement is the critical component of E-SCM and entails business- business/consumer/government method to buy and sell goods and services through the Internet.

Panda retail company runs all the procurement services through the Internet. All the inventories are run, analyzed, and kept by E-SCM. E-SCM provides the inventory replenishment system. Panda's customers replenish stocks online. The inventory explains the upstream and downstream movement of a stock through the supply chain and maintains the standard amount of products, quality, and prices.

SWOT Analysis

Panda Retail Company has a wide range of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. High-quality maintenance is one of its strengths. Panda Retail Company provides products of high quality, which not only creates brand loyalty but also attract new customers. Competition is critical in the food industry, so Panda Retail Company withstand the competition since it provides products of a higher quality. It has a broad market and an established brand name. Its market ranges from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Arabia (Ahmed 2019). All these countries have a high demand for food products. Panda Retail Company, as a brand, is widely known hence gaining a competitive advantage over its competitors.

The highly noted weakness of Panda Retail Company is that it does not provide many goods from south Asian brands. When it comes to food products, most consumers tend to be selective. Arabians and the United Arab Emirates, like South Asian food productive, compared to products from other countries. Panda Retail Company's foremost opportunity is that most of the markets in the United Arab Emirates are still untapped (Ahmed 2019). These enable them to strategize and capture all the markets before potential competitors emerge. The availability of a vast market creates an opportunity to increase sales and thus maximize profit.

The major threats to Panda Retail Company are high taxation and rising levels of inflation. There is high inflation in Egypt, which affected the prices of the goods and services offered by the Panda supermarkets and hypermarkets. High inflation reduces the profit margin while taxation raises the prices of products hence driving away from the customers. New stores opened in Dubai are likely to pose a substantial competition and reduce the market share of Panda Retail Company.

Strategic Planning

Strategic planning entails the formulation of business strategy, implementation, and evaluation of its effects based on the organizational objectives. It integrates various business departments to realize the corporate goal.

Logistic planning defines how business plans to deliver goods and services to its customers. Panda Retail Company uses warehouse planning since its products, foods stuff, have enough inventories to cycle via short-term needs, thus mitigating waste (Andersson et al. 2020). They have well-developed warehouse infrastructure and an explicit understanding of the market fulfillments required. Warehouse strategy is highly contingent on seasonal demand dynamic needs.

Procurement planning is a defined process of deciding the purchases when to make and the source of the purchases. Procurement planning helps Panda Retail Company ascertain the requirements to be procured over time. Panda Retail Company also uses it to monitor the procurement process to compare the actual performance with the planned activities, thus alerting the relevant departments to adjust the procurement plan accordingly.

Operational Optimization

It is an organizational strategy and a process that keeps pace with the continuously evolving global market. New methods, cost structures, and skills are needed to reflect the aspects of the market landscape. Operational optimization reduces the operation cost and erases inefficiencies, thus better business performance.

Supply chain inventory optimization is focused on the time instance to hold inventory in the distribution channel to achieve the desired level of customer satisfaction at the least cost within the prevailing restrictions and limits (Andersson et al., 2020). Panda Retail Company applies this optimization to balance the quantities of goods stored and distributed at a given time for it to gain high performance at a minimal cost.

Logistic resource scheduling refers to challenges in which decisions on resources i.e., job scheduling and transportation are incorporated into one framework. Panda Retail Company uses logistic scheduling to compare and balance demand in different branches. When demand in one supermarket exceeds its processing capacity, it is feasible to employ part of the capacity of the other hypermarket to subject to a job transshipment delay.

Reference

Ahmed, U. (2019). SWOT Analysis of Marketon Global Ltd.

Andersson, H., Granberg, T. A., Christiansen, M., Aartun, E. S., & Leknes, H. (2020). Using optimization to provide decision support for strategic emergency medical service planning–Three case studies. International journal of medical informatics, 133, 103975.

Erceg, A., & Damoska-Sekulowska, J. (2019). E-logistics and e-SCM: how to increase competitiveness. LogForum, 15(1).

Koufteros, X., Mackelprang, A., Hazen, B., & Huo, B. (2018). Structured literature reviews on strategic issues in SCM and logistics: Part 2. International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management.

Mangan, J., & Lalwani, C. L. (2016). Global logistics and supply chain management. John Wiley & Sons.

Robin, P. (2017). IMPROVING RETAIL SERVICE TIME USING RETAIL MANAGEMENT SYSTEM CASE STUDY: PANDA MART (Doctoral dissertation, Universitas Widyatama).

Shamout, M. D., & Elayan, M. B. (2018). A data article on E-supply chain benefits from supplier׳ s perspective. Data in brief, 21, 2441-2446.