Narendra Srivatsa, SupplyChainGurus.com
How well do you know your supply chain? What factors and data do you consider in your supply chain? Who owns the Supply Chain issues and efficiencies that can be derived from it – Is it the demand planner or Purchasing or who? What does your dashboard show you about the current state of your supply chain? Is it able to provide you the business impact instantly from any changes in the system and compare the different options? If not how many hours or steps do you need to go through to get to the answer? These are many of the questions than need to be addressed in today’s dynamic business environment.
A supply chain has to be designed with the most effective way to get a product to the customer when they need it and where they need it. Key word here is “Effective” as customer dissatisfaction can hurt a business much more than anything else. It has to be always designed with the customer experience in mind; not just getting a product from point A to point B.
At year-end 2018, MWPVL International reportedly estimates that Amazon operated 141 million square feet of distribution and logistics infrastructure in the US versus Walmart’s 132 million square feet. Are you taking advantage of any of this new warehouse capacity to make your supply chain more robust and affordable.
Your supply chain is a key driver of profitably. It is at the heart of your business and should be provided enough attention. Using decade old processes and systems may not be the bets way to approach this.
Some of the key pieces to consider for your supply chain are:
Allow for instantaneous scenario management where you should be able to assess business and customer impact from your supply chain. This should be also enabled for people across the different functional groups to work with as they need to understand the full implications of changes.
Be transparent and accessible.
Digitize your dashboard to get visualization.
Go with an adaptable technology that can pull information from different resources and does not require a lot of technical resources. A cloud based approach can provide the necessary access to pull the information and make changes easily across the systems.
Make sure that your vendors and other participants meet your compliance requirements and are aware of it with access to necessary training.
You need to have enough redundancy in your system to meet key challenges not just weather/location relates but also when a little know vendor is your vendor’s sole provider and their shutdown can impact your business.
This article has highlighted some of the key aspects of a supply chain to consider. We will discuss the specific digitization in subsequent articles. Just remember that Supply Chain impacts the profitability of your Business and is way more than Demand Planning. Pay enough attention to it and it will Pay back quickly.