Best practices are required in every industry to keep up with today’s digital landscape. Global supply chains change enough to necessitate comprehensive visibility and shared views across entire manufacturing enterprises and other industries. Integrated supply chain management and operations helps anticipate needs and demands from customers, suppliers, and other trading partners. Keep reading for 8 supply chain management best practices applicable to any process.
Hire the Best Supply Chain Management Team
Incredible value comes from individuals who understand market intricacies. Hiring the right people for relevant roles elicits optimal performance. Digital technology is essential to connecting the universe of supply chain management partners. Supply chain leaders need effective tools to share real-time information across networks of suppliers, customers, carriers, distributors, and government agencies.
Develop Strong Internal Communication Between Supply Chain and Inventory Teams
Risk mitigation is no small feat. Strong communication and team alignment are essential to global supply chains, inventory teams, and company departments. Tailor the right digital and interpersonal tools to every obstacle. Encourage transparency by prioritizing stakeholders at all levels, and meet on a regular basis to listen and take constructive feedback. Explore safe software solutions capable of storing and managing enormous amounts of supply chain management data. Real-time communication between your organization and supply chain partners is a win/win, enabling faster and easier planning, managing, and control over global supply chains.
For example, cloud software allows collaboration so that the logistics team, compliance group, customer service reps, and accounting department are all reviewing the same real-time details on orders, shipments, carriers, invoices, and more. The popularity of cloud options has steadily grown with increasing flexibility and scalability, along with less maintenance and overall costs involved.
Automate Your Procurement and Sourcing Efforts
Procurement and sourcing are core supply chain activities, as it affects almost every aspect of your company’s operations and profit margins. Yet, so often, purchasing and sourcing teams have to rely on manual processes and outdated tools.
Purchasing, sourcing and supplier management automation software removes the need for manual processing. Instead, repetitive tasks such as data collection, data entry, approvals and document hand-offs are automated to speed up processing, expedite supplier selection, boost cost savings, monitor supplier performance and reduce errors.
Build Long-term Relationships with Key Suppliers in Your Supply Chain
Success ultimately ties back to communication. In this remote age, technology is essential. Treat suppliers like partners and develop ongoing dialogue. As suggested in this Supply Chain Digital blog, “Foundations should be set on efficient communication, solid levels of trust, and a degree of empathy…with a joint focus on growth and value creation.” Other benefits of developing closer supplier relationships include lower costs for procurement of goods and rapid response to supply disruptions.
Use Data Collection to Forecast Supply Chain Trends and Needs
No one can predict the future, so studying the past is valuable in business. With historical reports, companies forecast trends to plan, budget, and stock inventory. This Shopify blog dives deeper into supply chain management forecasting methods like historical analogies, market research, and The Delphi method. Regardless, data is proven to optimize global supply chain performance.
To really survive and thrive, global supply chains must seamlessly optimize agility, efficiency, and resilience. QAD designs supply chain solutions to minimize friction, align with changing demand, and strengthen when challenged.
Incorporate New Technologies into Supply Chain Operations
Internal and external problems happen, oftentimes unplanned. Leveraging technology with supply chain operations increases functionality while cutting human error and cost. On a larger scale, global supply chains continue to be impacted as a result of the COVID–19 pandemic, changing regulations, labor shortages and other events. Accenture reports that 94% of Fortune 1000 companies are experiencing global supply chain disruptions. These complexities require effective supply chain management. Staying up to date on software further improves security and reduces maintenance costs, as well as streamlines training and compliance. Other benefits are the avoidance of excess inventory or stockouts. QAD offers a specific program to elevate brands from on-premise technology to the cloud.
Ensure Compliance with Relevant Regulations
Global supply chains face a perfect storm of challenges in today’s day and age. No matter what, ensuring compliance with various industry and government regulations mitigates risk. Technology is critical to remote communication, identifying pain points and avoiding regulatory violations. Quality, performance, and development issues are rampant with manual systems. Knowing your suppliers is good for the bottom line. Compliance across the supply chain helps to avoid problems and costly fines.
Streamline Inventory to Avoid Delays and Shortages
While tensions on global supply chains are expected to loosen over the next few years, it would be wishful thinking to believe things will ever totally return to normal – and, let’s face it – unexpected disruptions are a constant for supply chain professionals. The days of low-variance supply chain planning are over, and traditional suppliers must embrace the change or miss out on the evolving market. Streamlined inventory is needed to maximize available space and guarantee the minimum amount of supplies needed to maintain supply and demand.
Supply Chain Management Software
Supply chain management software helps manufacturers respond rapidly to demand and supply changes. If you want to build a more resilient and sustainable process amidst the chaos of scarcity and industry disruptions, contact us today.
