Ram Gopalakrishnan, chief executive officer of Bricz, discusses the technology investments that retailers need to make to deal with today's supply chain challenges.

As retail customers have developed strong e-commerce operations, many have leveraged their stores as mini-fulfillment centers, Gopalakrishnan says, and that shift in commerce has been quite successful. But a good number of retailers are still using logistics-centric distribution networks that work great for replenishment, but not so well when trying to “force-fit” e-commerce operations into them.

“Now there’s a big focus on consumer centricity, micro-fulfillment, urban fulfillment, market fulfillment,” says Gopalakrishnan. “Those are all big things that we see. And the last thing we're seeing is big trends in robotics and automation.”
 You can’t sell what you don’t have, however, so visibility becomes a major component in retailers’ e-commerce operations. “A lot of our customers are starting to invest in control tower solutions that will provide deep, meaningful visibility so that they can take action at the right time,” Gopalakrishnan says. “If you’re not going to get product through one port at the right time, then how do you redistribute some of that and still achieve what you want? So we see a lot of that investment.”

The focus is on holistic supply chain platforms that can enable fast and easy decision-making, Gopalakrishnan says, and much of the investment is in the cloud. “We’re seeing folks migrating to more sophisticated warehouse management solutions in the cloud — and a lot of the distributed auto management solutions that help with audit orchestration so that they can stay closer to the consumer and provide the right service levels.”
He says it's “early days” for many retailers investing in micro-fulfillment or urban fulfillment technology for, say, 50,000-square-foot distribution centers, but robotics and automation will make the transition easier.