Enable Supply Chain Success with A Supply Chain Optimization Software
According to recent studies, only 6% of organizations report full visibility on their supply chain, while 69% lack complete visibility. A robust supply chain optimization software can cut down supply chain costs from 9% to 4% and can double profits.
Supply chain optimization involves finding the critical optimal solutions that can generate the most productive and lucrative organizational performance while including all possible operational constraints and bottlenecks in the process.
At any point in time, an optimized supply chain stays responsive to market trends, manages costs, and most importantly, responds instantaneously to even minor fluctuations in demand.
Business problems solved using supply chain optimization
Gartner predicts that by 2023 intelligent algorithms and AI techniques will be an embedded or augmented component across 25% of all supply chain technology solutions.
Advanced technologies like machine learning, AI, and data science, when applied to the supply chain planning optimization process, automatically create a seamless and optimized supply chain. This helps solve several problems for them:
INVENTORY OPTIMIZATION
Managing inventory is one of the most crucial aspects of supply chain optimization as it affects several other parts of your supply chain, including procurement, order fulfillment, and production capacity planning.
With the ability to anticipate future demand trends, the first (and potentially the most) important impact is the elimination of understocking and overstocking – along with the associated cost of maintaining unwanted inventory/ dealing with unfulfilled demand. Supply chain optimization enables businesses to adopt a solely demand-driven approach to planning production, there is no longer any possibility of miscalculating necessary inventory levels.
DEMAND FORECASTING & PLANNING
With an optimized supply chain system in place, planners can significantly benefit from accurate planning and forecasting demand. An accurate view of the demand enables supply chain managers to get the right picture of the market demand and supply fluctuations and maintain the right amount of inventory available at all times. With effective demand planning,they can also cut costs significantly and can create an effective production and delivery plan while also drastically reducing lead times.
SUPPLY CHAIN COST REDUCTION & RESOURCE UTILIZATION
With optimal supply chain efficiencies seeded in, organizations can analyze overall operational efficacy by evaluating the performance of suppliers, output, and processes – thus helping identify and leverage potential cost savings.
This enables businesses to proactively identify underperforming sections within the supply chain, such as delayed supplies, unsold inventory, and inefficient distribution. They can also rectify operations – and reallocate resources – for tighter operations and increasingly better business outcomes.
What is Supply chain optimization?
Supply chain optimization helps organizations proactively respond to demand signal changes at the right time. They are easily able to optimize planning, production, logistics and distribution across the end-to-end supply chain, enabling them to unlock optimum material and cash-flow while beating their revenue targets.
The 5 Stages of Supply Chain Optimization & Maturity
According to Gartner, these 5 stages of supply chain maturity can help deep dive into adopting a relevant optimization model while benefiting from supply chain optimization across the organization.
- React to relevant outcomes that are needed to overcome misaligned or siloed business objectives
- Anticipate the necessary supply chain functional performance improvements
- Integrated supply chain decision making with holistics sales and operations involvement
- Collaborate for profitable demand-driven fulfillment through internal and external stakeholders
- Orchestrate shared value creation through innovation
Selecting a supply chain optimization software- Factors to be considered
To achieve the desired degree of supply chain optimization, it is necessary to create business models that accurately reflect the supply chain in its entirety and use algorithms to determine the best solutions. This requires advanced analytics such as predictive and prescriptive analytics to identify trends and the right interventions needed to optimize the supply chain.
SUPPLIER INVENTORY MANAGEMENT
As order fulfillment is an integral part of data-driven operations, the logistics optimization software that can help demand and supply planners with reduced shipping costs and complete visibility to provide the most effective supply chain solution.
DEMAND PLANNING
When planners can forecast unpredictable demand scenarios to better understand the needs of the customers, the supply chain optimization software that can enable accurate demand, supply, and price forecasting planning is the obvious choice.
TRANSPORTATION PLANNING
Supply chain planning software that can help logistics managers determine the most efficient and optimal route for transportation and distribution, should be always preferred.
SEAMLESS TECHNOLOGY INTEGRATION
Supply optimization software that is capable of providing advanced capabilities to help leverage technology effortlessly can result in better transparency, consolidation, and lower costs.
Key Features of the ideal Supply Chain Optimization Software
INVENTORY MANAGEMENT
Needed for tracking and managing the availability of raw materials, stocked materials, and spare parts for equipment. This feature can help manufacturers with key asset management, effective barcode integration, and future demand for inventory and price forecasting.
ORDER MANAGEMENT
Needed to automate the procurement order processes. This might help in generating tracking purchase orders, coordinating and scheduling of supplier deliveries, and designing key pricing and product configurations.
LOGISTICS AND DELIVERY COORDINATION
Needed to coordinate essential transportation channels, enhancing delivery processes, and ensure on-time delivery to end customers. Effective warehouse management features can enable effective storage optimization, labeling, labor management, and more.
FORECASTING DEMAND AND PRICING
It’s needed to anticipate and predict customer demand, pricing dynamics, procurement planning, and managing production processes accordingly. Accurate supply chain forecasting can go a long way in eliminating operational bottlenecks, predicting accurate revenue figures and customer demand, determining the correct cost of production and operations cost, assessing suppliers’ performance, and creating estimates of projects that need to be completed.
ThroughPut – The future of Supply Chain Optimization with Artificial Intelligence
As the landscape of the organizational supply chain goes through an evolution, the focus of the supply chain management function itself has shifted to advanced operational planning processes, such as analytical demand planning and integrated S&OP. Supply-chain management solutions based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) are expected to be most relevant to help organizations tackle these requirements. An integrated end-to-end supply chain approach can cover all possible opportunities and constraints of all business functions while providing the solutions to achieve higher OTIFs and reduced operational costs.
ThroughPut’s AI enabled supply chain planning solution has been designed to analyze massive volumes of data, enables predictive replenishment across complex supply cycles with real-time insights into operations, to accelerate accurate decision making. With ThroughPut, several growing organizations have benefited with holistic supply chain optimization and achieved the below outcomes:
Achieve forecast accuracy to align with existing sales & operations planning objectives
Manage real-time demand shifts
Boost material flow and inventory levels for guaranteed OTIF performance
Optimize and improve product and customer mix based on profit margins to generate free cash flow
