Winning In A High Velocity Retail

Retail has been speeding up for a long time. It was in the 1990s that Inditex ripped up the traditional rules of the supply chain to cut product lead times from six months to five weeks. It was only in 2009 that Amazon introduced same day delivery in the US. Ocado, and their automated warehouse solutions, will celebrate their 20th birthday next year. But speed is not just an internal phenomenon. The customer is captive no more: expectations, information, choice – and therefore competition – have exploded. As a result, the barriers of entry to previously high-walled retail markets have been knocked down.