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Prince Retail, a chain of retail and wholesale stores based in Cebu City, Philippines, announced they have successfully transformed data and process collaboration with their suppliers using Vendor Link, Algonomy’s Supplier Collaboration platform.

Prince Retail is leveraging Vendor Link to bring greater visibility into its supply chain processes—from ordering to delivery to payment. Prior to implementing the platform, these were done manually via phone calls, text messages, emails or fax, often resulting in errors and inefficiencies.

With Vendor Link, the vendors could access their POS data, which helped them gauge demand in the stores based on consumer sentiment, not just purchase orders. This helped them with their own forecasting to improve their assortment planning and stock availability. As a result, Prince Retail gets more efficient and profitable inventory/stock allocation across its stores and more relevant promoted packs and assortment.

Prince Retail uses Vendor Link to improve collaboration between its vendors and merchandising teams for operational and transactional activities such as order management, scheduling and payments. Further, the platform enables seamless data sharing to plan faster and more accurately for promotions and programs.

“Our objective was to create greater transparency and improve process efficiency across the supplier ecosystem. Vendor Link has more than met our expectations. The platform has created a data-driven culture among our internal teams and suppliers, helping make better decisions on a day-to-day basis,” said Rina Janine Go, Chief Merchandising, Marketing, and Distribution Officer at Prince Retail.

Using Vendor Link, Prince Retail is able to save a lot of time on the ordering process and no longer faces issues wherein buyers forget to send all the purchase orders of all the stores. Manual and recurring mistakes have been eliminated, and more time is spent on value-adding activities. Payment visibility has been a huge plus for vendors who can track their payments better and improve their delivery schedule.

Thanks to data sharing, most of the vendors’ programs are now data-driven and more impactful, as they are able to track their performance and their competitors’ performance with ease.

Further, Prince Retail sees fewer resources wasted on promotions and programs, and less overstocked inventory on products that do not move as well or promotions that do not work as well. Improved stock availability is also seen with better visibility on payments.

“Vendor Link is a comprehensive web-based collaboration platform that removes operational silos between vendors and retailers by automating and streamlining end-to-end operations,” said Amit Agarwal, SVP of Business Development at Algonomy. “We’re excited to help Prince Retail drive costs down, reduce wastage, and improve profitability.”

Prince Retail also solved issues in their order-to-pay cycle, especially with fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) vendors. Disputes on several aspects like actual quantity received, rebate deduction, and discounts were often reconciliation issues. Payment reconciliation often became the reason why the retailer’s succeeding orders were not served, which resulted in poor stock availability in stores.

Vendor Link served as a solution that enabled a faster and more efficient Accounts Payable (AP) process and provided better visibility of the order-to-pay cycle from when the suppliers delivered goods to the warehouses. As a result, fill rates rose and on-shelf availability improved. Furthermore, this helped Prince Retail significantly improve its relationship with suppliers.

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