What is ECR?
Efficient Consumer Response or ECR is a business concept aimed at better satisfying consumer needs, through businesses and trading partners working together.
In doing so, ECR best practices will deliver superior business results by reducing costs at all stages throughout the supply chain, achieving efficiency and streamlined processes. ECR best practices can deliver improved range, value, service and convenience offerings. This in turn will lead to greater satisfaction of consumer needs.
ECR principles support the belief that business success comes from delighting the consumer through meeting or exceeding their expectations. This can only be done through working together to remove inefficiencies and costs that add little value to the consumer. This principle applies to the grocery industry and many, if not all, other industry sectors.
ECR Australasia has embodied this philosophy in its slogan "working together for total customer satisfaction".
ECR is a "whole of demand chain" business activity and this is represented through the 13 core improvements concepts divided under the headings of Demand Management, Supply Management, Enablers and Integrators.
An International Phenomenon
Australia and New Zealand are not alone in these endeavours. Efficient Consumer Response organisations now exist in over 40 countries and regions.Europe leads the world in directing attention to the consumer and the building of consumer value—putting greater emphasis on the 'C' in ECR. Europe is also addressing ECR scorecards, collaborative planning, forecast and replenishment, category management and e-commerce. The United States, on the other hand, is shifting its focus very much to e-commerce both business-to-business and business-to-consumer. In Asia, there is a growing recogniton of the need for consistent, reliable, product identification, EDI messaging systems and industry catalogues and for improved processes to reduce inventory and improve product availability on shelf.
There are parallel projects in Europe, USA and elsewhere which create the risk of duplication or incompatible, regional solutions. Even where international standards exist, such as EAN product identification and EDI messaging, national deviations lead to substantial inefficiencies for manufacturers. This situation led major international suppliers and retailers to launch the Global Commerce Initiative (GCI) to address key technologies and processes that enable consumer goods to move more efficiently across the supply chain. They include electronic data interchange, product numbering and identification, standardised product tagging, global scorecard development and industry extranets. The Global Commerce Initiative explicitly acknowledges "supply chain practices between manufacturers and retailers have often not kept pace with the realities of global sourcing and trading".
Indeed, the pursuit of global best practice was a major motivation for ECR Australasia. Access to the best outcomes of those international activities will enable ECR Australasia to take those outcomes, adapt them to the Australasian scene and avoid the need to reinvent the wheel. In a supportive industry environment, ECR Australasia has a golden opportunity to achieve best practice at least resource cost.