Efficient Consumer Response Research Articles

The drivers of consumer value in the ECR Category Management model

This paper critically evaluates the proposed structure and contents of a frequently discussed Category Management (CM) model in the Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) context. Based on this we present an extensive empirical study where the data from a survey of 202 household representatives are merged with their actual purchasing data taken from a consumer purchase panel (>30,000 purchase observations). The results from an exploratory factor analysis and subsequent multiple regression analyses show that the investigated CM model needs to be amended by personnel and point-of-sale aspects as they affect Consumer Value significantly. The investigated differences between the drivers of Consumers' Value call for including both survey and consumer purchase data and consequently incorporating attitudinal and behavioural aspects into Category Management.

Les enjeux stratégiques de la mise en place de l’efficient consumer response pour les industriels

The objective of this research is to analyze the benefits obtained by manufacturers following the implementation of the efficient consumer response (ECR) and questions the impact of ECR ​​on the balance of power in the distribution channel. To respond to this problem, the conceptual framework of relational competitive advantage was mobilized as well as the work that addressed power in the distribution channel. This work has shown that the operational benefits of manufacturers following the implementation of the ECR are less important compared to the benefits of distributors. This mainly involves improving logistics performance and increasing sales. However, manufacturers should not limit their analysis to only operational benefits, because the implementation of the ECR also allows them to obtain long-term strategic benefits. On the one hand, they will improve their relationship with the distributor, which will lead to a long-term competitive advantage and on the other hand, they will increase their sources of power in the distribution channel, notably through the development of power. of expertise and reference. This work also emphasizes the importance of specific investments and confidence in creating and retaining created value.

A model for structuring efficient consumer response measures

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to propose a model which structures and links different types of efficient consumer response (ECR) measures; it does so by considering the use of both quantitative or “hard” and qualitative or “soft” measures in ECR, emphasizing the importance and causal role of “soft” measures throughout the ECR process.Design/methodology/approachThis paper reviews the ECR and performance measurement literature and proposes a model that explains linkages from intra‐organizational, inter‐organizational and industry prerequisites through ECR activities to ECR outcomes; and highlights the role of performance, behavioural, attitude and capability measures. Two extant studies from Austria and Denmark are examined in the context of the model to exemplify some of its features.FindingsSimilarities regarding issues of inter‐organizational and intra‐organizational prerequisites were found, but the two studies also demonstrated variety in the use of measures in ECR research.Research limitations/implicationsThe proposed model is presented for primarily future investigation; thus there is no empirical study in this paper other than a comparison of the two extant studies to support some constructs and variables. However, the model represents a structure that can guide future research on more specific ECR elements.Practical implicationsThe model makes a practical contribution by providing a structure from which measurement or scorecard systems can be established.Originality/valueThe model makes a theoretical contribution by providing an overall structure to link different areas of ECR research such as barriers for ECR implementation, and specific ECR concepts, activities, and their outcomes.

Supply chain management: a framework to characterize the collaborative strategies

The current intense competition forces enterprises to pay attention to supply chain collaboration with their upstream and downstream partners. Different collaborative strategies such as quick response (QR), efficient consumer response (ECR), vendor managed inventory (VMI) or collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment (CPFR) have already been proposed. The key to ensuring that the supply chain partners are progressing on the right track of creating the best-in-class practice lays in their ability to choose the appropriate strategy. The current paper proposes a framework, based on analysis grids and graphical representations, which help to better characterize these strategies. The analysis grids use several characterization criteria to express the collaboration nature and its extent. For a better understanding, this framework is then applied to the CPFR strategy.

Toward the Inter-organizational Product Information Supply Chain – Evidence from the Retail and Consumer Goods Industries

Since the 1980s, the retail and consumer goods industries have been making very extensive use of EDI-based data exchange. They subsequently developed the vision of Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) in order to integrate their demand and supply chain activities more closely. In the meantime, a growing number of studies report that poor data quality, in particular outdated or wrong product information, negatively impacts demand and supply chain performance. Whereas prior literature intensively studied the positive effects of information sharing on the coordination of supply and demand, this research is aimed at establishing a basis for understanding the phenomena of the underlying inter-organizational product information supply chain. Using coordination theory as an overarching framework, the main research contribution is a set of dependencies, coordination problems, and coordination mechanisms that characterize the product information supply chain. From their an analysis of two retailer-manufacturer relationships, we conclude that flow and sharing dependencies evolve into reciprocal dependencies as the intensity of demand and supply collaboration increases. However, the existing and emerging industry standards, - notably Global Data Synchronization (GDS) -, do not yet fully cover the inter-organizational coordination requirements that result from the identified set of sharing and flow dependencies.

A study of the supermarket industry and its growing logistics capabilities

PurposeThis paper aims to analyze and identify commonalities and differences between the supermarket industry and its logistics capabilities in developed economies such as North America, the European Union and Japan, as well as the emerging Asian economy of India.Design/methodology/approachA qualitative analysis, based on data, other pertinent information gathered from reports on various economies within the supermarket industry and personal interactions with a few supermarket chains managers, is used to derive various insights of strategic value in retailing and distribution. Major industry practices and logistics trends are examined and answers are sought to important business questions.FindingsThe results of analysis show that the supermarket industry is customizing operating strategies. Efficient consumer response (ECR) standards are becoming a common method used to increase the supermarket supply chain efficiencies that are driving logistics trends within the industry. The trends include expanded service requirements, mass customization, customer loyalty and private labeling, delivery options and increased challenges in diverse markets. Reverse logistics, electronic point of sale data collection and management of supply chain by third‐ and fourth‐party logistics providers are also becoming increasingly important for the supermarket industry.Practical implicationsAdvancements in transportation and storage technologies, including breakthrough technologies to improve supermarket operation to the level of leading automobile manufacturers, present increased challenges and opportunities to the supermarket industry. In addition, changing consumer tastes offer companies in developed countries as well as developing countries like India, the chance to garner increased revenues. It is imperative for supermarkets to heed changing buying habits, particularly in developed countries, which have highly mature/competitive markets. Although supermarkets within developed and developing countries may face different challenges, consumers everywhere still focus on value, convenience, variety and a better shopping experience.Originality/valueThis paper provides increased understanding of the strategic retailing and distribution issues present in the supermarket industry and examines a number of significant business questions pertaining to logistical trends. A unique juxtaposition of the supermarket industry within developed and developing economies provides various insights into the commonalities and differences within various countries studied.

Modelling and simulation of e-business impact on supply chain

With the impact of the e-business enabled supply chain on manufacturers and other members being deeply well understood and exploited, new supply chain strategies, such as vendor-managed inventory, collaborative planning, forecasting and replenishment, and efficient consumer response, have begun to exploit these new communication channels. This paper is aimed at establishing e-business-enabled supply chain procedure models and simulation research for quantifying the impact of information and communication technologies. Simulation results of e-business supply chains illuminate diverse practical effects under different kinds of demand.

Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) Practices as Responsible for the Creation of Knowledge and Sustainable Competitive Advantages in the Grocery Industry

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IMPORTÂNCIA DO PREÇO FRENTE AOS VALORES OFERTADOS PELA ESTRATÉGIA DE RESPOSTA EFICIENTE AO CONSUMIDOR (ECR)

To many authors, price is one of the most important -- if not the most important -- value for consumers. That value, however, has received little attention in ECR (Efficient Consumer Response) literature and is not included among the values presented in ECR: efficient product assortment, introduction, promotion and reposition.. This article reports the results of an exploratory study carried out in supermarkets in the city of São Paulo involving 300 consumers of biscuits and detergents. The main objective was to verify if price is less important for consumers than the values presented by ECR strategies, thus explaining its absence among those values. The results of the study demonstrate, however, that price remains a very important value for consumers, surpassing in importance other values offered, which suggests that it should be included as a new ECR strategy. Key words: Efficient Consumer Response. ECR Strategy. Price.

Value Chain Analysis: an ECR tool for assessing business competitive advantage

The goal of Value Chain Analysis (VCA), as a strategic tool, is to facilitate and speed up the application of Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) principles and methods. VCA methodology is applied keeping in mind the trends of a new era in the relationship between suppliers-producers-wholesalers and retailers. VCA approaches define current costs and performance, and assess the potential impact of proposed ECR improvement concepts across the entire supply chain. In this paper, the basic VCA approaches are described and compared with each other.

Dissemination of ECR in German dairy companies

The German food market has undergone tremendous changes in recent years. In food retailing a concentration process has taken place, discount shops have gained market share, and consumers have shown a hybrid and smart buying behaviour, demanding the highest quality at the lowest price. New information technologies have been developed and have enabled closer collaboration between the members of the chain. Therefore, the former isolated management of single firms should be replaced by vertical comprehensive management encompassing each member of the supply chain. In this context, Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) is seen as a successful supply chain strategy for the grocery industry. This paper provides an overview of the ECR concept and its strategies. Core requirements for a successful implementation of ECR in the dairy industry of three European countries are investigated. To that end, German, Austrian and Swiss dairies were surveyed about their preparedness and degree of implementation of ECR. Seven factors regarding the requirements were identified. However, these essential requirements for a successful ECR implementation have rarely been fulfilled so far. In practice, ECR is often tailored only to IT concerns. Distrust in the relationship between dairy companies and retailers and a lack of strategic orientation are the main obstacles for consistent implementation. According to these findings, the degree of implementation of ECR strategies is very low and the surveyed dairy companies only meet a few of the enabling technologies. The necessary logistic and marketing instruments are currently not being implemented.

Implantação do Efficient Consumer Response (ECR): um estudo multicaso com indústrias, atacadistas e varejistas

Introduzido na década de 90 nos Estados Unidos, o Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) teve sua maior difusão no Brasil em 1997, ano em que foi criada a Associação ECR Brasil, que passou a coordenar diversos projetos-piloto de ECR. Embora exista um esforço crescente das empresas em divulgar os fundamentos do ECR e o crescente interesse acadêmico por esse tema, é perceptível a dificuldade na compreensão da sua implementação e operacionalização. Com base nesse fato, o objetivo desse trabalho é fazer uma análise crítica da implementação do ECR, com base em pesquisa qualitativa realizada com indústrias, atacadistas e varejistas que compõem o canal de distribuição de produtos de mercearia básica. Buscou-se identificar nessa pesquisa que estratégias, processos e tecnologias do ECR estavam sendo realmente empregadas pelas empresas, os motivos que levaram essas organizações a implementá-las, as dificuldades enfrentadas nesse processo e a visão das empresas pesquisadas quanto a seus desdobramentos futuros no Brasil. Os resultados dessa pesquisa podem contribuir àquelas empresas que pretendem maximizar a implementação do ECR ou iniciar o processo de adoção dessa estratégia de gestão.

A framework for Global Implementation of ECR

Efficient Consumer Response is an approach to replenishing products by increasing efforts in inventory control, lowering costs and improving customer service. It is based on integrated Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), Demand Management, Continuous Product Replenishment and Enabling Technologies that help in ordering and tracking product, and information flows. This paper depicts the various ECR initiatives and then provides a frame work to study the global barriers in the implementation of ECR. The framework is based on several factors including trust, technology, macro-economics, organisation, finance and operations. This work is an initial attempt and provides a framework for future research. The literature review, though extensive, is not exhaustive and because of the dynamic nature of global commerce, the barriers identified are subject to change.

Measuring performance in multi-stage service operations: An application of cause selecting control charts

Many multistage service operations exhibit the cascade property, where performance at one stage is statistically correlated with performance at the preceding stage. Prior research on multistage services has analyzed each process stage independently or in an additive manner. Increased emphasis on Six Sigma initiatives in services has rekindled interest in the use of control charts to monitor and control service processes. This study examines the cause selecting control chart as a methodology to monitor and identify potential problem areas in an actual cascade service process and compares the diagnostic capability of the cause selecting chart to that of a traditional Shewhart chart. A grocery store whose parent company was implementing efficient consumer response (ECR) serves as the research context. This study models the grocery store as a two-stage cascade process and uses operating data from the store to construct a cause selecting chart and a traditional Shewhart chart for the front-end operation. Analysis of the two charts reveals that the cause selecting chart outperforms the traditional control chart as tool for signaling unusual variation in performance at the front-end stage. The analysis demonstrates that service managers can receive misleading or erroneous information from traditional control charts if the service process being monitored is a cascade process.

Do Suppliers Benefit from Collaborative Relationships with Large Retailers? An Empirical Investigation of Efficient Consumer Response Adoption

Collaborative manufacturer–retailer relationships based on efficient consumer response (ECR) have become ubiquitous over the past decade. Yet academic studies of ECR adoption and its impact on marketing relationships are relatively scarce. Inspired by the relational view of competitive advantage, the authors empirically investigate whether the extent to which suppliers of a major retailer adopt ECR has a beneficial impact on their outcomes. The results demonstrate that whereas ECR adoption has a positive impact on supplier economic performance and capability development, it also generates greater perceptions of negative inequity on the part of the supplier. However, retailer capabilities and supplier trust moderate some of these main effects. The overall results are robust with respect to differences in supplier size as well as between branded and private-label suppliers.

Supply Chain Collaboration:: Making Sense of the Strategy Continuum

Collaboration in the supply chain has been widely discussed, and a wealth of concepts is at hand. Large-scale projects like the Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) in the fast moving consumer goods sector, for example, or Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) and Collaborative Planning, Forecasting and Replenishment (CPFR) initiatives more generally provide a rich continuum of strategies for collaborating amongst supply chain partners. While individual successful implementations of the latter have already been reported, there has not yet been the widespread adoption that was originally hoped for. In our research, we looked at implementations across several industries and countries, and our findings show that the slow progress to date may be due to a lack of common understanding of these concepts, and the difficulty of integrating external collaboration with internal production and inventory control. In this paper, we set out to classify collaboration initiatives using a conceptual water-tank analogy, and discuss their dynamic behavior and key characteristics. We draw upon case studies from both successful and less successful implementations to illustrate what companies need to do to fully benefit from their collaborative efforts, given their particular circumstances. We conclude that the effectiveness of supply chain collaboration relies upon two factors: the level to which it integrates internal and external operations, and the level to which the efforts are aligned to the supply chain settings in terms of the geographical dispersion, the demand pattern, and the product characteristics.

Efficient consumer response: literature review

Since efficient consumer response (ECR) was first introduced into the academic literature in 1993, it has been defined more in the sense of a system or a philosophy rather than a particular concept and stresses the complete vertical integration of the marketing channels. The purpose of this paper is to collect, categorise and merge the existing knowledge of ECR. The paper explains the ECR strategies, definitions and initiatives that were found in the academic literature. The main contribution of the paper is the compilation and classification of the ECR academic literature.

The use of category management practices to obtain a sustainable competitive advantage in the fast‐moving‐consumer‐goods industry

Despite massive efforts of suppliers and retailers in the fast‐moving‐consumer‐goods (FMCG) channel to adopt the efficient consumer response (ECR) practices, many of the expected benefits have not been realized. This study examines the history and implementation practices of ECR in the USA and in Germany and presents conceptual models that compare the likely outcomes when ECR‐based category management practices are initiated either by the supplier or by the retailer channel partner. Combining the knowledge gained from a series of interviews with industry experts with their own ECR experiences, it is shown how a strategic competitive advantage can be realized through the combination of both supplier and retailer views and expertise in category management practices. The article concludes with an examination of barriers to implementation of category management plans and suggests ways to overcome these barriers.

O uso da ferramenta gerenciamento por categoria na gestão da cadeia de suprimentos: um estudo multicaso

Diante do atual cenário competitivo, indústria e varejo estão buscando alternativas que garantam sua continuidade no mercado brasileiro. Para tanto, estão buscando atender eficientemente aos seus consumidores finais, oferecendo um mix de produtos adequado ao perfil de cada grupo de clientes. É dentro deste contexto que a ferramenta gerenciamento por categorias (GC), e outras práticas do ECR, estão começando a fazer parte do dia-a-dia, da cultura e das estratégias dessas empresas. Este artigo, visando fornecer subsídios para compreender como o GC pode ser uma ferramenta que otimiza a eficiência na gestão da cadeia de suprimento, apresentará as principais ações a serem desenvolvidas para a implementação dessa ferramenta em pequenos e médios supermercados, suas características facilitadoras e limitadoras, bem como os critérios para a escolha do parceiro.

Channel collaboration and firm value proposition

In recent years, “efficient consumer response” has replaced prior management fads and rules of the competitive landscape in the field of grocery trade. This initiative thrives on creating value for the final customers through an efficient supply chain value system, and simultaneously appropriate value for the channel members involved. However, much of the evidence to date remains anecdotal, and thus, the channel collaboration – value conduct reminds a “black box”. We adopt a capabilities view and a contingency framework is proposed to test the postulated relationships between the key constructs by deploying multi‐country data. Our results indicate a strong positive association between channel collaboration and firm value proposition, and further that the relationship has a contingency specific profile. In managerial terms, business executives must carefully design a match between the strategic channel posture the firm possesses and its value creating and appropriating capability profile in managing collaborative channel relationships.