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Consumer expectations are evolving and retailers are under more pressure than ever to come up with compelling propositions for consumers. As the EY Future Consumer Index study shows, consumers want retailers to make their lives easier, better and more satisfying.

In a dynamic world with rapidly changing market trends, customer experience is everything. Successful companies place the customer at the center of retail operations to achieve sustainable growth.

Anyone with a warehouse knows that many times when goods are delivered, workers waste time looking for the goods in the warehouse, or even if they know where the goods are, they don't go through the warehouse in the ideal order and make another trip back because they have forgotten to take a product.

Logistics managers should be based on the principle "Work smarter, not harder", that is, to work more "intelligently" by organizing warehouses to perform.

The profitability of companies in FMCG, Retail, Production or Distribution is based, to a very large extent, on the efficiency and productivity of the warehouse. When it is well organized and the activities are carried out efficiently, the financial results are also commensurate.

IGD has identified the main trends that will influence the global retail & FMCG market in 2023. With inflation driving a significant increase in production costs and retail prices in most markets, organizations will focus heavily this year on optimizing costs, improving the efficiency of distribution networks and will look for new ways to deliver added value to consumers.

Currently, companies in the FMCG field are very quickly feeling the challenges brought by this very hectic period. The obstacles in the supply chain, the very frequent changes in purchase prices, the lack of raw materials, the cautious behavior of consumers - these are the most frequently mentioned challenges by managers of FMCG companies in Romania.

An automated warehouse brings increased performance and decreased costs. Order processing, inventory management, warehouse space optimization and end-to-end traceability are no longer a problem for a warehouse that has understood that investing in a modern, flexible and extensible WMS system actually means increased profitability.

Worldwide, distribution has become a particularly dynamic economic sector, and trade itself has undergone mutations on all levels, diversifying sales methods and forms of distribution. The main phenomena that generated this "mutation" are:

• the demographic phenomena that left their mark on the evolution of customer tastes, favoring the modernization of distribution

• increasing purchasing power, diversifying needs and ways to satisfy them

• the transformation of the way of life determined by the increasingly high degree of urbanization, the expansion of large cities through the development of new neighborhoods, etc.

One of the most important tasks of the purchasing department is to reduce costs by optimizing stocks. A not so easy task, because it must be constantly juggled and avoid both overstock and stock shortages. A fine line and balance quite difficult to maintain without a process of continuous tracking and optimization.

KPI indicators are metrics that measure the performance of business processes. Performance indicators are mostly used so that the organization can make constant improvements to procedures that lead to better productivity and preserve profit margins.