The traditional process of sequential and linear supply chain will not meet the dynamic needs of business today. Customer behavior, global financial situations and political scenarios, and uncertainty of nature affect supply chain management. This makes supply chain planning most critical for managing the success of a supply chain and an organization.
Collaboration between all the players in the supply chain process is crucial for the growth of an enterprise. An integrated supply chain planning will digitally connect each component of the supply chain. This will allow the process to respond to disruptions in the supply chain with agility and in real time based on changing conditions, resulting in higher customer satisfaction.
New Age Supply Chain
The three ‘Cs’ to enable agility in supply chain network are
- Connect Data
- Connect People
- Connect Plans
- Connect Data: In today’s digital world, organizations can connect disjointed systems by using technology appropriately and by leveraging On-Cloud data storage SaaS model across the organization. Organizations should invest in a platform, which can integrate the data existing in siloes into one single version of truth. This system should act has a source to multiple supply chain plans. Organizations can keep pace with the ever-changing nature of current business scenario by updating the plans real-time if the data to multiple plans is sourced from a single source system.
- Connect People: To make an agile supply chain possible, all the stakeholders of the supply chain process need to be connected and move at ‘digital speed’. Organizations still rely on legacy channels for communication between manufacturers and suppliers. This leads to a slow and unresponsive supply chain. Organizations should implement cloud based, real time collaborative technology platform, which will increase transparency of information and connect the key stakeholders of the supply chain process seamlessly, increasing overall supply chain agility. This will enable planners to make quick and real time decisions, which is essential in the fast changing and agile nature of today’s business environment.
- Connect Plans: An organization’s strategic plan, tactical plan and operational plan should be connected in integrated and agile supply chain planning to support day-to-day operations including what-if scenarios. In a connected supply chain platform, planners will be notified in near-real-time about the change in customers’ demand due to connected stakeholders using real time collaborative platform. Using the real-time information of a customer’s demand, a planner can immediately access impact on supplies of raw materials, inventory, capacity and run what-if scenarios on connected supply chain platform. The optimal solution can be identified by evaluating scenario outcomes against criteria like impact on financial performance and delivery reliability. This solution can then be shared with customers, suppliers, manufacturers, logistic providers and other partners for acceptance or further refinement, if needed.
Identifying a platform which can enable a connected and agile supply chain by connecting data, people and plans is a must for an organization to grow in the digital world and to have edge over the competitors.