The Time-to-Action Dilemma in Your Supply Chain

If you can’t answer these 3 sets of questions in less than 10 minutes (and I suspect that you can’t), then your supply chain is not the lever it could be to drive more revenue with better margin and less working capital:

1) What are inventory turns by product category (e.g. finished goods, WIP, raw materials, ABC category, etc.)?  How are they trending?  Why?

2) What is the inventory coverage?  How many days of future demand can you satisfy with the inventory you have on-hand right now?

3) Which sales orders are at risk and why?  How is this trending?  And, do you understand the drivers?

Global competition and the transition to a digital economy are collapsing your slack time between planning and execution at an accelerating rate.

You need to answer the questions that your traditional ERP and APS can’t from an intelligent source where data is always on and always current so your supply chain becomes a powerful lever for making your business more valuable.

You need to know the “What?” and the “Why?“ so you can determine what to do before it’s too late.  

Since supply chain decisions are all about managing interrelated goals and trade-offs, data may need to come from various ERP systems, OMS, APS, WMS, MES, and more, so unless you can consolidate and blend data from end-to-end at every level of granularity and along all dimensions, you will always be reinventing the wheel when it comes to finding and collecting the data for decision support.  It will always take too long.  It will always be too late.

You need diagnostic insights so that you can know not just what, but why.  And, once you know what is happening and why, you need to know what to do — your next best action, or, at least, viable options and their risks . . . and you need that information in context and “in the moment”.

In short, you need to detect opportunities and challenges in your execution and decision-making, diagnose the causes, and direct the next best action in a way that brings execution and decision-making together.

Some, and maybe even much, of detection, diagnosis and directing the next best action can be automated with algorithms and rules.  Where it can be, it should be.  But, you will need to monitor the set of opportunities that can be automated because they may change over time.

If you can’t detect, diagnose and direct in a way that covers your end-to-end value network in the time that you need it, then you need to explore how you can get there because this is at the heart of a digital supply chain.