Google Buys Rangespan to Add Inventory Management to Google Shopping | Hacker News Reader

Google Buys Rangespan to Add Inventory Management to Google Shopping

techcrunch.com

26 pointsamirhhz8 comments

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.

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

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.

>Their core product was more likely used by marketers than supply chain professionals, and its intersection with SCM was superficial at best.

I have looked at them to use them as a marketer, not as a logistics solution.

A big leap into ecommerce I feel so.

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

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.

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

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