Supply Chain

The secrets to successful supply chain optimisation

Supply chain optimisation, in a nutshell, means delivering products to customers at the lowest cost with the highest level of profit. It is an organic process that evolves with cost and service dynamics. A company should not only consider this during mergers and acquisitions but also as a regular activity, considering the changes to material costs, carriers, and customer demographics.

According to a survey, an overwhelming 79% of the companies believe that supply chain optimisation directly improves revenue. But how does it work? The answer to this lies in the untapped enterprise data, 60–70% of which sits idle on one of the many servers in the company.


Why is optimising supply chain processes important?

An optimisation model in the supply chain can help your business grow and gain the required visibility, data insights, and direct sales ability. You can invest in technological advancements and organisational changes to achieve long-term corporate goals and cost reduction.* Here are some of the prominent benefits:

  • Eliminate data silos:
  • With multiple locations and warehouses, the supply chain data is often in silos, which causes low end-to-end visibility. Technology that collects this data and translates it into meaningful information can greatly increase your efficiency, profits, and demand forecasting.

  • Meet the customer needs:
  • Customer demands are constantly evolving. Regular innovation and optimisation in the supply chain can help you meet and even predict these demands.

  • Reduce costs:
  • Logistics and supply chain are operation intensive. Redundant or ineffective actions can quickly elevate the overall costs. By automating the tasks and retiring unwanted ones, you can significantly reduce costs across locations, which can help you manage inventory, infrastructure costs, and warehousing capacity better.

  • Gain competitive advantage:
  • Logistics is a competitive business and having a competitive advantage is a matter of execution-oriented technology and real-time decision-making.

  • Be agile:
  • Modern supply chain and logistics businesses must remain agile to adapt to changing customer needs, competitor moves, and any disruptions in the overall landscape. Regular optimisation and innovation can help you stay agile.

  • Sustainability:
  • Supply chains can no longer afford to create large carbon footprints in the way they package and transport goods. The end users want to know if their order was handled ethically and sustainably.

Other benefits include reduced time to delivery and associated risks, better management of new suppliers, reduced surplus, business continuity, and better collaboration with partners.


Supply chain optimisation phases

The secret to optimising the supply chain is turning enterprise data into useful insights that deliver a tangible ROI. With the help of technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), IoT, and machine learning (ML), one can develop a supply chain for a high-efficiency business. The three phases for a successful supply chain are:

  • Supply chain design:
  • At this stage, you set the strategic objectives, describe the design process, and conduct demand forecasting. This stage also includes packaging optimisation, product flow between the sites, and establishing supplies and warehouse locations.

  • Supply chain planning:
  • This phase includes a deployment strategy for balancing supply and demand, coordinating assets to optimise customer experience, and inventory planning.

  • Supply chain execution:
  • This includes warehouse and inventory management, inbound freight management, and transportation management. This stage also includes real-time supply chain visibility and decision support system.

In addition, these phases also include supplier management, supplier inventory management, cost management, logistics management, and resource management. [2]


How Infosys BPM can help ?

With only 13% of supply chains delivering successfully during high demand, optimisation and innovation is the need of the hour. Infosys BPM helps its partners transform, streamline, and digitise their supply chain fulfillment. Our portfolio of end-to-end solutions is technology driven with services such as:

  • BPM service:
  • Plan the demand, inventory, and supply with an integrated planning hub.

  • Digital services:
  • Diagnose existing supply chain services and deploy newer operating models for better forecasting.

  • Technology services:
  • With a platform as a service, leverage the technology for solution enablement.

*For organisations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed organisational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism, will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organisations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organisations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.


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