As industry attitudes and consumer behaviors change, so does the challenge of sustaining a business in the fashion industry. The global health crisis has accelerated the need for retailers and fashion brand owners to reconsider the concepts of brick-and-mortar shops to meet the demands of digitally native consumers—while still maintaining omni-channel supply and ensuring sustainable production to allow for recycling. The landscape is evolving more quickly than many can adapt.

Despite these difficult new industry dynamics, fashion companies big and small still can turn these challenges into channels of transformation. Those who can observe and react to shifting buyer behaviors, regulatory changes, and the growing number of channels to market will not only gain a competitive edge, but also help assure the future success of their business.

Are you reducing idle cash while reducing risks?

Today, financial services organizations are more focused on what’s necessary to safeguard business continuity and solvency. Much of this begins with greater visibility and reliability of key data to help drive your critical business decisions, especially during critical market changes.

Our current blog series is reviewing cash and treasury best practices you can follow to prepare for instant payment changes and build true cash visibility. Last week we looked at understanding the impact of instant payments. In part two this week, we focus on generating cash positioning.

Consideration #2: Generate cash positioning

To satisfy both operational and regulatory requirements, financial services organizations need operating models for cash and liquidity management. To achieve and maintain this capability successfully, organizations need to focus on gaining greater visibility into their cash and liquidity.

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Cash and treasury: Prepare for instant payments and build true cash visibility

Today, financial services organizations are more focused on what’s necessary to safeguard business continuity and solvency. Much of this begins with greater visibility and reliability of key data to help drive your critical business decisions, especially during critical market changes.

Whether you call it faster payments, immediate payments, instant payments, or fast money, real-time payments technology has gained a solid foothold in the payment processing world.

Additionally, to satisfy both operational and regulatory requirements, you need operating models for cash and liquidity management. To successfully achieve and maintain this capability organizations need to focus on gaining greater visibility into their cash and liquidity.

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Cash and treasury: Prepare for instant payments and build true cash visibility

We have compiled a blog series that will focus on cash and treasury best practices you can follow to prepare for significant changes with instant payments and build true cash visibility. This week, we focus on the first consideration: understanding the impact of instant payments.

State governments want their software to be secure, compliant and designed for the 21^st century. As such, many state governments are evaluating their current ERP platforms to determine how to modernize financials, procurement, human capital management, and payroll applications.

While some have pursued modernization by embarking on multi-tenant cloud journeys, most organizations are still in the planning phase.

They are moving in the right direction, though, as multi-tenant cloud SaaS software ensures applications are continually enhanced without the need for a multi-million-dollar, multi-year project. Multi-tenant cloud software also protects limited resources from overwhelming or menial tasks such as:

• Babysitting servers
• Applying and testing an endless number of patches
• Performing backups
• Managing disaster recovery

The evolution of supply chain business models has been accelerated by unprecedented disruptions. As a result, there has been a clear shift from analog supply chains models of the past into a trajectory towards a digitalized ecosystem. These new business models recognize and necessitate the move to a digital and integrated supply chain that provides visibility and ease of use for consumers.

This journey is about moving towards a world where all parties participating across your network are connected to a single version of the truth. Supply chain thinking is shifting from ‘linear supply chains’ to ‘supply chain eco-systems’ propelled and supported by digital technologies.

Gartner has established a five-stage model of the journey to supply chain maturity, ranging from manual, analog systems to a fully digitalized ecosystem. Key differentiators along this evolutionary chain include consideration of data and collaboration, with the ultimate goal of integrating data across multiple systems to achieve a fully connected ecosystem that provides transparency and visibility for your company both internally and externally.

Are you able to monitor all intraday activity for true cash visibility?

Today, financial services organizations are more focused on what’s necessary to safeguard business continuity and solvency. Much of this begins with greater visibility and reliability of key data to help drive your critical business decisions, especially during critical market changes.

Our current blog series is reviewing cash and treasury best practices you can follow to prepare for instant payments and build true cash visibility. In the previous post, we reviewed best practices for enhancing cash and liquidity forecasting. This week, we focus on ways to establish intraday liquidity monitoring capabilities.

Consideration #4: Establish intraday liquidity monitoring capabilities

Banks and financial services organizations bound by intraday liquidity regulations have an opportunity to build a stronger competitive position.

According to consulting firm Oliver Wyman: “Analysis indicates that a 25–50% reduction in intraday liquidity costs is well within reach. Further, banks will also stand to benefit from optimal efficiency, improved risk management, and timely decision-making around this scarce resource.” There are numerous financial and non-financial benefits, as well as new technological tools that simplify these complex treasury functions.

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Cash and treasury: Prepare for instant payments and build true cash visibility

A critical lesson many organizations have learned when measuring the success of analytics initiatives is that speed of deployment and widespread user adoption are key factors to consider. These are key benefits of analytic applications delivered with or embedded in ERP systems or business applications.

Analytic applications provide pre-built business intelligence (BI) and analytical capabilities that promise to democratize analytics because most of the hard work in transforming data to insights has already been done. However, the historical challenge these applications faced was that they weren’t built with agile cloud technology or modern data architectures that could keep up with the growing complexity, scale, and changing requirements of the line of business (LOB)-driven analytic requirements.

The ability to execute, seamlessly and in real-time, is critical as your company works to develop a continuous supply chain. Being uniquely capable of connecting multiple facets of this execution -- not just to an order management system but also to TMS for transportation management and WMS for warehouse management will be key components to implementing continuous supply chain execution.

Integrated multi-party source-to-settle process

Sourcing execution or the ability to establish real-time connectivity to suppliers is key. What we are really speaking to here is the need to orchestrate end-to-end physical and financial operations between order management, global trade management, transportation, warehouse, product traceability, and even payables management.

Streamlined manufacturing

Manufacturing execution is focused on streamlining processes, driving better decision making and gaining productivity. Supply chains must optimize and automate the manufacturing process from raw materials and components to finished goods. Having the ability to anticipate and optimize lead times is crucial for downstream improvement.

The future of planning is connected, intelligent, and continuous. Yet many companies remain so far away from this vision, it often seems unachievable. With many planning processes being so siloed and disconnected from execution, they can feel ineffective.

Fortunately, evaluations of the planning landscape reveal many organizations are adopting technologies that move towards a de-siloed, network-based approach to planning. For these companies, the primary goal centers around connecting planning capabilities to “a single version of the truth.” To optimize planning capabilities, it crucial to achieve this connection at the enterprise level as well as into the broader supply network.

But to do this involves using integrated business planning (IBP) or sales and operations planning (S&OP) to collaborate and analyze, perform demand planning to improve forecasting, optimize supply planning, and facilitate synchronization. Each of these areas are critical to a successful planning process and are more powerful when integrated and connected across a network.

An estimated $350 billion of invoices are typically involved in supply chain finance programs. Known as "reverse factoring," this process assists suppliers in obtaining the capital needed to keep supply chains humming, as described by Aite Group. Opposed to traditional receivables financing or factoring, reverse factoring is driven by the buyer and its relationship to a bank or finance provider, with capital being made available to suppliers based on the relationship parameters.

Banks are happy to step in, within specific jurisdictions and credit profiles. Research firm Coalition reports that banks logged approximately $12.7 billion in revenue in the first half of 2020 via total supply chain finance volumes. However, limitations are significant, and often times, the suppliers that need financing the most are excluded from such programs.