Amjad Hussain, sitting in his Troy, Michigan office, carefully traces the silk road on the antique globe kept on his side table and says, “There was a time when this was a global supply chain network that connected retailers, suppliers, consumers and merchants on planet earth. My company is a modern incarnation of this.” Hussain cannot be wrong, as SilkRoute is currently connecting a large number of global retailers and their suppliers across three continents to help them embrace new tech trends in the fast-changing retail sector.

The landscape of retail sector is moving in the direction of Omni Channel demand chain optimization and consumer discrete choice behavior prediction. Given the scale and complexity of today's global supply chains, there is no easy way to predict and prepare for a possible disruption. “Supply Chain Resilience is a practical approach for addressing the choke points in the chain,” says Hussain. “The endless thrust to improve end to end efficiency and reduce costs requires new kinds of supply chain models and thinking,” says Hussain, whose team is working towards lowering the overall risk of retailers and the suppliers while increasing the in-store on-shelf availability with minimum inventory possible.

Built by MIT trained scientists and retail industry experts, SilkRoute is an integrated omnichannel retail and rewards solution. The company has woven in sophisticated mathematics and business process automation into their software to ensure optimal business decisions and operations in the manufacturing, wholesale and distribution chains.

Leveraging the power of analytics, the best of breed SaaS solutions cover a broad but focused spectrum including consumer demand sensing and shaping, demand driven retail category management, supplier managed inventory, self service brand campaign management and a dynamic consumer insights engine.

"We are passionate about helping the clients to make their journey from warehouse to POS with ease,” says Hussain. We look at the problem from POS back to the warehouse to the manufacturing floor. The company processes billions of unique item location combinations and receives POS data from suppliers and stock retailers, making it easy to perform B2B integration, as a part of their core SaaS offering. This enables upstream and downstream integration with suppliers, WMS systems, and retailers for speedy implementations in 30–45 days time frame. The solution also comes with a unique risk free implementation model, designed according to the customer’s need.

SkyLight, one of SilkRoute’s major SaaS solutions is a robust end-to-end item-location life cycle management tool. It optimizes all aspects of the retail demand chain with the mission to sense demand, stock smart, sell more and see everything. SkyLight has superior demand forecasting, inventory management and assortment optimization algorithms at its very core, built by the data scientists. As a mission critical tool, SkyLight SaaS suite delivers sophisticated category management and vendor managed inventory (VMI) tools that help drive bottom-line results for all stakeholders in the retail value chain.

Another solution of SilkRoute, SkyPrize gives brand owners the power to target demographically specific consumer groups, allowing the consumers to engage in rewards and loyalty programs. Also in the array of products is SkyPulse that uses Show of Hands, a highly rated lifestyle consumer app to mine rich consumer choice and opinions database. The app has nearly 200 million votes logged so far, and it generates tens of thousands of answers to questions asked every day.