Deep Supplier Insights For Resilient Retail Supply Chains

Sourcing Playground旨在提高英国零售商供应链的弹性并降低风险，这些供应链在很大程度上受到冠状病毒的影响。英国零售市场有306，655家公司，占GDP总量的5%，销售总额为3，940亿英镑（2019年），雇用超过290万人。零售业是英国经济的关键部门和支柱。 新型冠状病毒突显出该行业依赖过时的线下方法来采购和鉴定制造商的自有品牌产品，由于供应链问题，公司对不断变化的客户支出反应缓慢。 Sourcing Playground是一个为品牌和零售商提供供应商发现和资格认证的在线平台。在成功获得赠款资金后，Sourcing Playground为英国零售市场开发并推出了一个创新的人工智能驱动的采购和采购网络应用程序，供采购和采购团队用于开发自有品牌产品。最初的拨款使采购签署了2个主要合同作为早期支付试点，现在正在寻求进一步的资金，以满足新的技术挑战，以满足客户需求，加快市场速度，扩大新的业务和商业活动，以产生更多的销售。提高英国零售商的竞争力和进入市场的速度--减少5%的公司相关采购成本2。通过多样化提高供应链的弹性3。该产品将确保快速消费品行业的零售商能够扩大其一级和二级供应链的供应商发现和资格认证，提高供应商透明度并改善战略采购。该行业首个在线网络应用程序还将提供更深入的市场洞察，使零售商能够做出更自信的购买决定，并将新产品的上市时间从六个月缩短至一个月。该项目旨在让英国零售商在几天内（而不是几个月内）迅速实现供应商基础的多元化，通过发现和认证新的二级和三级供应商，帮助降低风险和对一个国家生产的依赖。只有7%的零售商表示，在疫情期间，他们的供应链有足够的灵活性，可以更换供应商。我们的目标是将这一数字提高到30%。（零售经济学，2020）。

Sourcing Playground aims to improve the resilience and mitigate risks of UK retailers supply chains that have largely been affected by the Coronavirus.The UK retail market has 306,655 companies generating 5% of the total GDP with a total £394 billion of sales (2019) employing over 2.9 million people. Retail is a key sector and backbone to British economy. Coronavirus has highlighted the industry's reliance on outdated, offline methods of sourcing and qualifying manufacturers for their own brand products with companies being slow to react to changing customer spending because of supply chain issues. Sourcing Playground is an online platform for supplier discovery and qualification for brands and retailers. Having successfully received grant funding, Sourcing Playground has developed and launched an innovative, AI driven sourcing and procurement web app for the UK retail market, used by buying and sourcing teams for the development of private label products. The initial grant enabled Sourcing to sign 2 major contracts as early paid pilots and is now seeking further funding to meet the new technical challenges to meet client demand and increase speed to market and scale new business and commercial activities to generate more sales.The innovative project has three main objectives:1. improving UK retailers' competitiveness and speed to market - reducing 5% of companies' associated sourcing costs2. increasing their supply chains' resilience through diversification3. improving companies' digital capabilities ensuring buying roles and jobs remain within the UK.The product will ensure retailers within the fast-moving consumer goods sectors can scale supplier discovery and qualification for their tier 1 and tier 2 supply chains, improving supplier transparency and improved strategic sourcing. The first in the industry online web app will also provide deeper market insights so that retailers can make more confident buying decisions and increase their speed to market for new products from six months down to one month.The pandemic has highlighted that companies with production of products in one country open themselves up to huge risks. The project aims to allow UK retailers to quickly diversify their supplier base in days as opposed to months, by discovering and qualifying new secondary and tertiary vendors helping to mitigate risk and reliance on one country for their production. Only 7% of retailers say they had enough flexibility in their supply chains during the pandemic to be able to switch suppliers. We are aiming to increase this figure to 30%. (Retail Economics, 2020).