I am back from attending the RVCF Fall meeting in Scottsdale last week. It is an interesting group. It started out as the Retail Vendor Compliance Federation years go, serving mostly back then as a forum for consumer goods companies to vent about chargebacks/deductions from retailers. RVCF founder Kim Zablocky later got the bright idea of bringing retailers into the mix and push a more collaborative agenda, and today the acronym stands for Retail Value Chain Federation, a combination of retailers and vendors. It can be argued vendors have more to gain from collaborations that allow them to better optimize production schedules, a benefit the retailer obviously cannot receive. So it was a good forum to discuss the results of SCDigest’s new (and quite interesting) benchmark study on the state of retailer-vendor relationships in 2015. The results of the report were first unveiled at one of our Townhall Meetings last month, and now the full report is available. You can find it, the on-demand Townhall Meeting, and more at the report resources page: The State of Retailer-Vendor Supply Chain Relationships 2016 I did a retailers are from Venus, consumers goods companies from Mars piece a couple of years ago, based on results from a smaller scale survey back then that showed some very different ways of thinking about the supply chain between retailers and their consumer goods company "partners." As I noted at RVCF, if one goes back through all the supply chain initiatives in this sector dating back to the 1980s (Efficient Consumer Response, Continuous Replenishment, Quick Response, CPFR, EPC RFID, the shelf-connected supply chain), the language used to describe the problems and opportunities as articulated by groups such as GS1 and VICS are virtually identical over all those many years. That is, there is much to be […]