5 Capabilities That Every Supply Chain Solution Must Offer
Building Robust Supply Chains that are Equipped to Overcome Tomorrow’s Business Challenges
According to Gartner’s recent survey, only 21% of organizations are confident of operating with a highly resilient supply chain network. And high resilience here translates into good visibility and the agility to shift sourcing, manufacturing and distribution activities around swiftly and rapidly.
The respondents to the same survey also confirm that increasing supply chain resilience and agility will be a priority as they emerge from the severely impacted post-covid dynamics.
As optimized operations across the value chain are critical for steady growth and development, any key capabilities which can help establish an agile supply chain which is not just strong enough to tackle today’s challenges but also capable of offsetting possible crises in the future, are the absolute need of the hour.
Supply chain leaders are turning to and evaluating technology offerings that promise to deliver resilience, agility and visibility. But what should you look for in a marketplace with an endless number of glamorous solutions?
Let’s find out.
Essential Capabilities of a Supply Chain Solution Which Can Endure the Test of Time
Today, every growing organization aims to achieve the ideal supply chain – one which is resilient and agile, designed to deliver more than simply resist, recuperate and operate.
Supply chains of tomorrow are the ones which are built using key capabilities and modern supply technologies that allow them to predict and anticipate in real-time while responding and acting quickly to whatever risks or opportunities the future brings with it.
Here, we discuss the 5 key capabilities that robust supply chain solutions need to offer to ensure organizations are always on their toes to face possible disruptions that could take over their steady rate of operations at any time.
A volatile market and ever-changing supply demand dynamics make the perfect case for ensuring granular visibility and actionability into demand, inventory, and logistics operations.
But most organizations struggle to acquire this level of visibility and as a result have little or no control over the impact of disruptive and unpredictable changes in all of these aspects, also directly affecting the overall cash flow.
A holistic supply chain solution offering end-to-end visibility can help in multiple ways:
- Accurately predict and eliminate bottlenecks in productivity
- Safeguard and enhance margins and share of wallet.
- Ensure continued profitability and growth by meeting customer demand
Given the uncertainty that has plagued the industry in the last few years, accurate demand sensing is a top priority for companies. However, demand planning that only relies on historical data is proving to be the Achilles heel of effective supply chain planning.
Sensing demand down to the SKU level using a smart supply chain planning solution can help:
- Ensure availability of the right amount of product at the right place, at the right time
- Cut costs significantly across the supply chain, resulting in effective, disruption-free production
- Optimize distribution plans and enable significantly reduced lead times
What lessons do small companies learn from manufacturing goliaths and market leaders? How can these companies outperform their competition? Well, simply put, the answer lies in the importance of capacity planning as it helps align production to the ever-changing demand dynamics.
By ensuring capacity is optimized accurately, companies can manipulate large amounts of data to model, analyze and streamline operations. This goes a long way in assessing large-scale network optimization down to the SKU-level inventory and transportation analysis.
While this blog only touches the tip of the iceberg when it comes to choosing the right supply chain planning solution, you can delve deeper into this Guide on Supply Chain Optimization which gives a holistic view of how these capabilities need to be evaluated to be considered as a best fit for your organization.
As a bonus, we have also shared pro-tips that can help you narrow down the vendors who can provide these benefits and the guidance on how you can shortlist them.
Another key capability in any supply chain planning solution.
When different functional aspects of the supply chain seamlessly collaborate, this drives business resilience creating high power efficiencies across the value chain. Facilitating supply chain planning and collaboration is an important requisite in a supply chain planning solution to enable all entities or business units to work together towards common goals.
A great way to make this happen is by tracking demand trends and using these insights proactively to ensure the right product is always available at the right volume, at the right place and time.
A responsive and agile supply chain planning solution is one which is built on a faster time to market. When the implementation cycle is cut down from years to months and months to weeks, this increases the probability of experiencing a strong ROI in lesser time.
This also leads to greater trust and support from the network of vendors and partners, thereby, enhancing the chances of future investments as well.
Getting Started
If you wish to contact us to understand how ThroughPut can help you in your supply chain planning, do visit us here for a quick demo.