The best and the most strong organizations survive thanks to the carefully designed supply chain strategy. The Oracle suggests some tactics to achieve better SCM.
1. Perform accurate demand forecasting to know the market better and react to the changes immediately.
Precise forecasting and emergency planning can provide a full picture of your business processes and immediate response to disruptions like natural disasters, political movements, communication problems with suppliers, and other factors that may affect production and logistics activities.
Leaders can also revise their pricing and advertising strategies to adapt to demand, promote new products faster, accelerate revenue streams, or even increase margins for a popular product with insufficient market supply.
The most important here is to be ready to use unprecedented events in your favor and mitigate the possible adverse effects so that your company stays on top and succeeds.
With the rise of ambitious technologies such as Blockchain, IoT, robots, the supply chains become more resilient, flexible, visible, and easy to manage.
2. Develop a responsive and flexible supply chain with accurate planning and integrated solutions at hand.
Once company leaders have a better vision and can instantaneously reshape the demand and risk, the next step is to build supply chains that match to ever-changing industry events. Organizations must deploy robust planning tools and constantly regulate operations to ensure the adaptiveness of SCM.
The new model of global supply chain management addresses new changes and rapidly responds to them, which allows you to minimize or even reduce breakdowns across the whole network.
The integration of edge tools, like autonomous cars, interconnected devices for warehousing and inventory management, Blockchain smart contracts, AI-based drones, give businesses:
- Outstanding visibility.
- Better collaboration across the entire chain.
- Easier prediction of sourcing and supply events.
- Just-in-time production.
- Real-time transportation tracking.
- Effective warehousing.
- Accurate decision-making.
3. Align product development with supply and manufacturing operations to speed up successful innovation.
Embracing innovations helps corporations to be competitive. But to succeed, the goods must be designed cost-effectively, in the proper place, and at the right time. Product management should be optimized with suppliers, manufacturers, and transportation procedures. The actual budget has to be properly analyzed to keep balance across the full-cycle business.
Besides, innovative products and competitiveness are closely connected to the choosing and maintenance of suppliers and techs. If a company can control the information, people, operations, and decisions associated with the product lifecycle, it can become an industry leader.
4. Foster green initiatives within global supply chain management to enhance the company’s reputation and overall business.
Organizations that strive to be socially and environmentally friendly have a better reputation, achieve significant competitive benefits, fine-tune production and communication with suppliers, and achieve higher employee engagement. Sustainable efforts in SCM may bring many new opportunities:
- Executives need to integrate a green approach into their SCM as a core element of logistics. Adopting green initiatives can bring supply chain processes to the next level, from cost-effective alternative sources of power to better company image.
- Then, executives should address the problem with excessive energy consumption and setting real-time visibility. This enables the decrease of carbon emissions, conscious use of power sources, less waste with recycling materials, and route optimization.
- Businesses can stay afloat and outrank rivals by continually improving via regular assessments, audits, and new skills. Through regular compliance audits and defining best practices, a company can easily keep supply chain operations eco-friendly.
5. Ensure a regular supply of products that can be easily predicted.
Without a stable supply of goods, companies won’t be able to reach the appropriate service levels. This might lead to dramatic losses and, which is more serious, supply shortages.
That’s why responsible managers must improve operational performance to ensure flawless supply chain activities. With reliable SCM software, a company has all production processes synchronized and integrated with the demand-planning procedures.
