Retailer's cost savings with quick response implementation : department store case

Abstract

To succeed in today``s competitive marketplace, retailers and their suppliers increasingly rely on information technology, especially EDI to achieve the decisive efficiencies they need. These changes have brought significant changes in the way information technology is perceived to enable business processes. Such changes have yielded wake up calls to retailer and its supplier organizations in the form of business process reengineering initiatives and a reassessment of the role of IT. Under this redesigned organizational context, the advent of so called Quick Response (QR) technologies of EDI and scanning in general merchandise industry in the late ``80s took a far greater significance. There have been many studies and much has been written in recent years about supply chain management from manufacturer``s point of view. However, few has been written about QR in retailer``s perspective, thus by developing the research framework under the conceptual approaches for the retailer``s business performance measurement, this research attempted to be the first field study in Korean retail industry to determine whether they receive benefits through QR implementation. With the adopted research framework, this research was conducted at a selected single retailer which is a leading department store in sales volume and advanced technology installations since only few retailers started QR implementation and no particular differences were found among the QR implementers in terms of the implementation level, and department store represents most type of retail business since they are dealing with general merchandise as well as grocery. This research also investigated required QR technology investment by engaged parties and analyzed their cost benefits in the Korean retail industry, and identified whether retailer and vendors participating in the QR implementation receive immediate benefits. This research findings show that Korean retailer and vendors receive cost saving benefit t...