Study of collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishments in South Africa retail industry

Collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishments (CPRF) is a set of business processes that help eliminate demand and supply uncertainty through improved communications between supply chain trading partners. One way to address the bullwhip effect caused by order batching is to collaboratively plan production, forecast demand, and replenish inventory. This will lead to smaller order sizes, smoothed production volumes, and more frequent order replenishment. The result will be a smoother flow of smaller orders that the distributors and manufacturers, and able to handle more efficiently. In recent years, retailers have initiated collaborative agreements with their supply chain partners to establish well on-going planning, forecasting, and replenishment process. The purpose of this study is to find the benefits of CPRF, shortcomings of CPRF and significant differences, if any in the understanding of seven success factors of CPRF in supplier and retailer industries. Success factors were identified from a critical literature review and survey approach has been used to collect relevant data from suppliers and retailers. The paper finds that success factors have different rankings in suppliers and retailers, but both sectors comprehend that implementation of CPRF success factors is very important.