How Zara manage their inventory?
Twice a week, at precise times, store managers order clothes, and twice a week, on schedule, new garments arrive. To achieve this, Zara controls more of its supply chain than most retailers do.
Centralized Inventory management
Zara designs thousands of products every year and delivers them to their stores twice a week. It adopts an inventory management tool that makes it easy for them to determine what products, how many, and which sizes should it be delivered to the stores.
CASE STUDY CONCEPT: Zara's Unique Business Model is Driven by Its Supply Chain Capabilities. Zara changes its clothing designs every two weeks on average, while competitors change their designs every two or three months.
Zara's overarching strategy is achieving growth through diversification with vertical integrations. It adapts couture designs, manufactures, distributes, and retails clothes within two weeks of the original design first appearing on catwalks.
Zara uses just in time production process with focus on in-house manufacturing [5] which enables company to be more responsive to demand changes. Zara uses frequent in-season assortment changes – company produces 50-60% of clothes in the start of the season.
Quick response to Demand – Zara follows a pull model in their inventory and supply chain management. They create up to 1000 designs every month based on store sales and current trends.
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Cin7 Orderhive | Best Overall |
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How does Zara use its supply chain capabilities to generate competitive advantage? the management of up and downstream relationships with suppliers and customers to deliver superior customer value at less cost to the supply chain as a whole.
How does Zara use its supply chain capabilities to generate competitive advantage? Stocking clothing far in advance of sales to ensure in-stock availability. Buying new seasonal clothing lines in bulk to take advantage of volume discounts from suppliers.
Like I said, Zara is close to is suppliers due to inditex, Zara have in average 400 suppliers. Most of them are in Europe (70%) and the other are in Asia (30%). Zara choose to work with European supplier to reduce the risk of quality and improve the rapidity of the supply chain.
What makes Zara so successful?
The Zara brand strategy
Its core values are found in four simple terms: beauty, clarity, functionality and sustainability. The secret to Zara's success has largely being driven by its ability to keep up with rapidly changing fashion trends and showcase it in its collections with very little delay.
Portugal, Morocco, India and Bangladesh are the next biggest suppliers of the group, with over one hundred local partners. India and Bangladesh are also the ones with the largest workforce, after China, with over 275,000 workers in India and near half a million in Bangladesh.
Zara discounts only about 18% of its making, approximately half the levels of competitors. Instead of additional quantities per style, Zara produces extra styles, roughly 12,000 a year. So, that style sells out more fast and there are more new styles which are already waiting to come out.
To stay ahead in the fashion race, Zara updated its fashion collections continuously by holding low stock. Kanban systems are operated right from the store level. Sales managers are responsible for their Kanbans. Orders are sent to headquarters twice a week, based on the current sales data.
It's highly responsive supply chain ships new products to stores twice a week. After products are designed, they take ten to fifteen days to reach the stores. All of the clothing is processed through the distribution center in Spain. New items are inspected, sorted, tagged, and loaded into trucks.
While some competitors outsource all production to Asia, Zara manufactures its most fashionable items – half of all its merchandise – at a dozen company-owned factories in Spain (particularly in Galicia), Portugal (northern part) and Turkey.
Access to real-time visibility of supply and demand, costs and fulfillment measures, and trend. A clear understanding of inventory costs, turn rates, and profitability that allows for effective margin management.
H&M manufactures 80% of its retail inventory in advance and, during the year, introduces the remaining 20% based on present-day market trends. Affordability is reached with strong supplier relationships, paired with manufacturing strategies that reduce lead times.
- Prioritize your inventory. ...
- Track all product information. ...
- Audit your inventory. ...
- Analyze supplier performance. ...
- Practice the 80/20 inventory rule. ...
- Be consistent in how you receive stock. ...
- Track sales. ...
- Order restocks yourself.
Because they are so complex, big businesses often use expensive inventory planning software (also known as enterprise resource planning or ERP) to keep track of their many products and to avoid production delays and stockouts.
What is Zara doing to be more sustainable?
Garments labelled with 'Join Life' are produced using processes and raw materials that help reduce environmental impact. The company is now aiming that 50 percent of its products will meet the 'Join Life' standard by 2022. Its boxes, bags, hangers and alarms are reused and recycled at the end of their useful life.
Every single piece of clothing passes through one of Zara's four distribution centers across Spain.
ZARA used "customer intimacy" in relating to their customers. This method allows the company to understand more about what their customer wants. They input the information to their cloud-based system wherein the head-quarters in Spain have access and analyze the behavioral pattern of their customers.
Zara's value proposition focuses on keeping up with fast-changing fashion trends. Its activity configuration allows it to spot trends and launch new pieces in less than three weeks. Competitors show two collections per year and take over nine months to get items to stores.
Zara's success is based on its ability to adapt quickly. Unlike many clothing brands, whose designs are stagnant for the season, Zara is constantly assessing and reacting to the environment in a matter of weeks. The brand designs new styles and pushes them into stores while the trend is still at its peak.
Who is the customer? Zara's target market is young, price-conscious, and highly sensitive to the latest fashion trends. They have an advantage over traditional retailers because they do not define their target by segmenting ages and lifestyles giving them a much broader market.
They prioritize customer needs and insights. The staff and employees are trained to provide the best customer service possible. The brand uses cutting-edge systems to track the location of garments instantly and makes those most in demand rapidly available to customers.
However, the brand has recently faced three main challenges: e-commerce, competition and sustainability. To sustain its global expansion, the brand made a step toward digital expansion even before the pandemic hit, and it paid off. So far in 2020, Zara reports a 74% jump in online sales alone.
Since, among other things, Zara's supply chain is so short and efficient, Zara is able to respond to any changes in trends much quicker than its competitors. As well, Zara is able to produce small batches of clothes without fear of not meeting demand, because it can quickly respond to surges in demand.
- H&M. Year founded: 1947. Headquarter: Stockholm, Sweden. ...
- Uniqlo. Year founded: 1949. ...
- Gucci. Year founded: 1921. ...
- Nike. Year founded: 1964. ...
- Urban Outfitters. Year founded: 1970. ...
- Gap Inc. Year founded: 1964. ...
- Forever 21. Year founded: 1984. ...
- Adidas. Year founded: 1949.
How does Zara use JIT?
As we have seen, Zara has efficient Just in time running also they are more customer focused as there most of the designs are made according to the customers demand. With the efficient JIT system Zara has reduced the wastage in the company. Most of the Zara's products are lower in cost with good quality.
Kanban. One of the most obvious Lean techniques used by ZARA is a pull-model, which is also known in the Toyota Production System as a Kanban system. A Kanban system uses a queue of resources that are ready to be pulled by the following process as they are needed.
Kanban tools are now used by Pixar, Spotify and Zara | International Lean Six Sigma Institute.
Zara discounts only about 18% of its making, approximately half the levels of competitors. Instead of additional quantities per style, Zara produces extra styles, roughly 12,000 a year. So, that style sells out more fast and there are more new styles which are already waiting to come out.
Key Differences
Zara divides the products sold within its stores into lower garments and upper garments, with price points being higher for the upper garments. Zara hopes to be perceived as a high-end retailer with affordable prices.
Every single piece of clothing passes through one of Zara's four distribution centers across Spain.