Dive Into a New Product Category

How should those rules be administered and by whom? Cooper suggests that a cross-functional team — never just one department — should be in charge. “The rules should be developed in concert with operations, insisted upon by the buyers, and administered by the inventory control group,” she notes.

Guschke recommends setting up an organizational unit with specific responsibilities to administer and monitor vendor compliance on a daily basis, most frequently as a component of the logistics/distribution function. Also, he says, a multidepartmental compliance team — with reps from buying/merchandising, distribution, legal, inventory management and finance — can be set up to establish policies, guidelines and criteria.