Radial, the leader in omnichannel commerce technology and operations, announced that they have partnered with Blue Ridge Global, a provider of cloud-native supply chain planning solutions. Combining operational and logistics expertise with advanced machine intelligence, the partnership allows retailers to intelligently place inventory across locations and more accurately match supply with demand. Radial Inventory Optimization powered by Blue Ridge is part of Radial’s solutions that are designed to help retailers differentiate themselves and scale in today’s difficult retail economy.

As retailers face mounting competition, it’s more important than ever that they do everything possible to retain their customers. In the past year, more than 75 percent of Americans reported coming across out-of-stock items and 79 percent said that they would turn to a competitor if the product they are looking for is not available. It’s critical that retailers connect customer demand to the supply chain to reduce customer turnover, enhance customer experience, drive sales success and recoup up to $1 trillion per year in lost profits due to overstocks and out-of-stocks.

Together, Radial and Blue Ridge offer retailers a complete solution to solve two of their biggest challenges – inventory optimization and profitable order fulfillment. The solution:

• Reduces stock outs through precision forecasts that blend predictive and statistical models of demand with supply chain signals for maximum accuracy.
• Reduces excess inventory due to overstock and obsolete inventory through automated planning that continually optimizes for business objectives and produces action-ready recommendations that respect the unique logistics of the supply chain.
• Reduces time-in-transit and exceptional transportation costs to offer more profitable fulfillment and improve customer experience by allocating optimal inventory across products, nodes and time.

“Optimizing inventory placement continues to be one of our client’s biggest challenges,” said Stefan Weitz, executive vice president, technology services, Radial. “Retailers could face significant losses because of their difficulty to accurately predict customer demand. Radial Inventory Optimization marries Radial’s fulfillment expertise with Blue Ridge’s expertise in data science and supply chain planning to provide a complete solution for retailers, so that they reduce losses related to overstocks and understocks.”

“As today’s retail climate grows increasingly competitive, companies need to be able to spot and plan for changes in customer demand before they even happen,” said Jim Byrnes, CEO of Blue Ridge. “By teaming up with Radial, we have been able to provide customers with unparalleled certainty to forecast customer demand, the speed to react to market conditions and position inventory where it should be, and the assurance of ongoing analysis and action-ready recommendations from expert practitioners.”

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