

Google Buys Rangespan to Add Inventory Management to Google Shopping - amirhhz
http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/02/google-buys-rangespan-to-add-supply-chain-management-to-its-e-commerce-business/

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saosebastiao
Rangespan isn't Supply Chain Management any more than Google Shopping is
Google. Their core product was more likely used by marketers than supply chain
professionals, and its intersection with SCM was superficial at best. I think
there is a deficiency at Google as to their understanding, as an organization,
of what supply chains are. It shows in their hiring listings, where anything
with SCM keywords usually ends up being a procurement job of some sort.
Nowhere does it mention logistics, inventory management, resource and capacity
management, etc...despite having several clear use cases for those
capabilities.

Google appears to be pursuing a coherent vision for a consumer supply chain,
and is cobbling together parts of that vision, but I don't think they can be
successful without a stronger core platform. The Robotics and AI and Analytics
startups that they are scooping up would be amazing acquisitions for a fast
growing retailer with existing supply chain operations (like Bi-Lo, Michael
Kors, or H&M), but they are too specialized to be able to form a base for a
retail expansion.

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gopher1
I'm not very familiar with this product, but wouldn't the predictive analytics
features help with inventory management?

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saosebastiao
Any form of improvement in forecasting can help with inventory management, but
that is only one aspect of it. You need to have the ability to perform
abundant and well tuned stochastic optimization, and you have to have control
and accounting systems that ensure that your data and real life agree with
each other. This usually goes far beyond software into the realm of hardware
and operations.

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techaddict009
A big leap into ecommerce I feel so.

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brador
They'll always have a problem until they find a way to scale customer service.

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elq
Have you actually contacted customer support for Shopping Express? I have,
twice and both times my issues were resolved very much to my satisfaction
quickly.

Further, customer support for Nexus - my one issue with them was also
satisfactorily resolved quickly.

I understand that my experiences are not necessarily the norm, but I see this
quip posted regularly and I don't know if people who post it actually have any
experience.

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lazylizard
we emailed support for google apps..they even called!

