Supply Chain

Dos and don'ts of managing a supply chain

Worldwide, the past couple of years have witnessed massive supply chain disruptions across almost every industry. As global supply chains have begun recovering, supply chain management is in the limelight. Here’s a list of dos and don’ts that organisations can follow while managing their supply chains and remain profitable and competitive.

Supply chain dos

Utilise your company’s entire supply chain to gather and analyse data:

Thanks to technological advancements and automation, supply chain management has now become multidimensional and can comprehensively manage large, complex sets of business data. Your business should take advantage of advanced supply chain management models to analyse operations quickly and accurately. You can effectively identify issues within the supply chain and forecast customer demands and supplier delays to make informed decisions to enhance your processes.

Educate your employees about buying behaviours and implement change management techniques:

It is crucial that the employees of a company are aware and educated on their spend patterns and where they can use management techniques to optimise supply chains. To further this, invest in professional courses, certifications, and department-level training for employees. This way, they would be better prepared with strategies and solutions in case of any unprecedented issues in the business life cycle. 

Scan and review the entire supply chain:

Regardless of whether your organisation is large or small, you should ensure that its supply chain is consistently scrutinised from top to bottom. Managers should be agile in identifying problems, vulnerabilities, opportunities, and threats and devise a well-crafted status report and a subsequent action plan for supply chain management.

Maintain strong communications with suppliers and vendors:

One of the most critical elements of supply chain management is key supplier relationships. Every business must have strong communication channels with their vendors and proactively discuss plans and strategies to deal with fluctuating demands and changing capacities, focusing on product availability, quality, quantity, delivery times, and manpower.

Cut off inexpedient partnerships:

Part of supply chain management involves trimming the disadvantageous relationships that your business is in. If a working relationship with vendors is no longer productive, or a method or a strategy is outdated, your business must be able to discard them before they cause more problems.

Improve supply chain transparency:

An enterprise can reap the most benefits from its supply chain management solution if it keeps information transparent across all channels. By enforcing better visibility, businesses can overcome issues that stem from a lack of communication, take precautionary measures for potential vulnerabilities, and predict demands and delays. By increasing your supply chain’s transparency, everyone in the company is aware of all the processes and strategies and can take quick actions without much internal friction.

Supply chain don’ts

Don’t under or overspend:

Businesses often end up under- or overspending due to the lack of proper procurement plans. You must look into your spend patterns and perform a detailed spend analysis to understand how to optimise purchases.

Don’t stick to old principles and policies:

Supply chain management is a long and complex system, and there is no universal solution to managing different kinds of businesses and enterprises. What works for your rival businesses may not work for you, and what worked for your company in the past might not be as effective in the future. To avoid becoming unprofitable and obsolete, your organisation should adapt to new goals and requirements, keeping current and future business trends in mind.

Don’t think of supply chain management as a one-time process:

Supply chain management is not just a one-time deal; it is an ongoing process that demands continuous tracking and analysis. To enrich your organisation’s efficiency throughout the business cycle, you should replace old-fashioned supply chain management solutions with advanced AI-powered, automated models that can help promptly detect and resolve issues across the supply chain.

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 on 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.

How can Infosys BPM help?

At Infosys BPM, we offer supply chain optimisation solutions that include end-to-end solutions across consulting, technology intervention, and managed services to help your organisation streamline and digitalise its supply chains. With our expertise and technology, your business can build and manage an agile and flexible supply chain that underlines innovation, digitisation, and security.
Our supply chain management framework includes the following solutions:

• Supply Chain Diagnostics
• SC Shared Services Advisory
• SC Control Tower
• Forecasting as a Service
• Inventory Optimisation