Omni-channel operations

Hello. My name is Peter Atorough. I'm a lecturer in Operations and Supply Chain Management with the Robert Gordon University here in Aberdeen. Today I'm going to talk with you about the topic omni-channel operations. The concept of omni-channel operations has become important in organizations all over, especially the retail sector. And I will be looking at why operations and supply chain managers should know about this topic and should care.

The agenda for today's discussion will mainly focus on the idea of what omni-channel is, why it has become important, its implications on business practice, and what is required to successfully achieve it. So, to start us off, just a simple question. Have you ever experienced, or has your customer ever experienced this situation, where they have purchased an item from your organization through one of your channels, be it a retailer or directly from yourselves, and perhaps the item develops an issue and they need that item attended to. Well, they go back into the store, the store says to them, oh, sorry, we don't provide the warranty for this item. It's a third party that provides the warranty. You have to call them. Or, sorry, you need to go directly to the producer of the product. Or I'll give you a different example. If you've ever bought a mobile phone from a company like, say, Carphone Warehouse or one of the third-party providers of this, you might find that once there's a fault, you go back to Carphone Warehouse or you go back to Orange or O2, whichever of the companies that owns the brand, they refer you back and say, well, you purchased it from different provider, therefore you need to go there. This can be quite frustrating for the customer, and if they are like me, eventually they give up. Now, we will look at omni-channel as a potential possibility to solve this kind of problem and to address this issue.