As a part of FM Business Daily’s ongoing subject matter expert content, ShelfAware CEO and Founder Andrew Johnson provides supply chain management best practices and practical business strategy every month for facility managers and other industrial professionals.
ShelfAware’s vision for the future of business-to-business supply chains is to provide an ecosystem where the market’s largest consumers can enjoy the benefits of an omni-channel solution while collaborating with hundreds of independent, niche product vertical suppliers through a robust digital vendor managed inventory (VMI) platform.
Founder and CEO Andrew Johnson is a second-generation entrepreneur and inventor and grew up inside the family distribution business. Formerly the sales manager at the family’s distribution company, O-ring Sales & Service, he now spearheads the tech startup, ShelfAware.
ShelfAware is redefining industrial distribution by leveraging RFID technology, the internet, and the power of data. Johnson works with his three equally-talented and passionate brothers. Together, they have grown the family business to almost 10 million in revenue (3x since 2008) and launched two new companies (ShelfAware and an E-commerce venture with Amazon) all while keeping their talented staff onboard and sane. They have accomplished this by doing more with less—very lean distribution using automation to grow revenue while maintaining the same staff of 15 full-time employees.
Supply Chain Management Business Strategy
In his monthly series on supply chain management for FM Business Daily, Johnson provides useful and easy-to-implement business strategy advice about how to use automation and business savvy to successfully and accurately manage complex industrial supply chains.
Whether your company wants to pull the trigger on a new e-commerce platform, a shiny, all-inclusive ERP, or discuss grand ideas like Industry 4.0, too many industrial distributors are falling prey to the temptation to swing for the innovation fences, attempting to hit an innovation homerun, and inevitably striking out.
In Johnson’s experience, that dream scenario rarely plays out like that. Instead, it’s a slow, very intentional process of incremental innovations that lead to the home run. So, where do we start? What does this process look like? How can we afford automation? How can we gain knowledge and strategic decision making from granular consumption data? What are the best types of new innovations that work in today’s industrial landscape?
These are some of the topics Johnson will cover monthly for FM Business Daily.
Click here to read the first installment of Andrew Johnson’s practical business strategy advice on supply chain management.
Understanding Digital VMI for Supply Chain Management
ShelfAware is a supply chain automation platform that equips business-to-business suppliers with a next-generation supply chain solution for consumers of physical inventory goods. This is accomplished by leveraging simple technology to track inventory consumption in real time. The ShelfAware platform creates a transparent, secure bridge between product suppliers and consumers allowing for strategic collaboration like never before.
The tech backbone of the solution is RFID (Radio Frequency Identification). This technology has been around in other industries for a while, but it is finally ready to revolutionize the industrial supply chain landscape.
“We chose RFID because we knew consumers were demanding an almost magical data capture experience,” Johnson says. “They do not want to interact with a device like a barcode scanner, a keyboard, or worse yet, a clipboard. In addition, we have seen the price and capability of RFID tags and hardware reach a point where mass adoption was a no-brainer. All of our inexpensive, proven and readily available pieces of RFID hardware are combined seamlessly with our custom software solutions.”
The ShelfAware solution tracks only a few key data points around product consumption. However, it is efficient and at a large scale, allowing the leverage of that real time consumption data to automate even the most complex supply chains. The automation savings are seen at both ends of the B2B supply chain with suppliers and consumers seeing big gains. Accurate consumption data allows for inventories to turn monthly with no stock-outs across thousands of SKUs.
By matching supply with demand, the daily management of the vast majority of items in a supply chain are automated. This creates time for managers at both ends to focus on long-term improvement projects and stop worrying about the daily inventory tasks.
Manage Your Supply Chain Today
Digitizing inventory doesn’t have to be an expensive or overwhelming task. In fact, with a platform like ShelfAware, suppliers and consumers can reduce their carbon footprint, make more money with less worries, and eliminate stockouts with an easy-to-manage, cloud-based digital vender management inventory system.
Try a digital VMI platform like ShelfAware for a sustainable solution to supply chain management.
Want to learn more about an affordable way to automate your supply chain? Request your free ShelfAware demo.
Too good to be true? ShelfAware is redefining the vendor-managed inventory industry. For this reason, we’re happy to talk to you about how our intelligent inventory platform can benefit your business. Contact us today for more information.
