Supply Chain

The benefits of supply chain value stream for sales and fulfilment services

The value proposition of the products and services you offer your customers plays a critical role in understanding, fulfilling and exceeding your customers' expectations and building sustainable competitive advantage. Value stream mapping is a great tool that can help you identify and understand the points where you are adding value to different components of your operational processes. And value stream management can help you improve your value proposition. Even within your supply chain, you can leverage the supply chain value stream to optimise your supply chain and improve operational efficiency.

But to fully understand how value stream mapping is beneficial for your supply chain, you must first understand what value stream mapping and management are.

What is value stream mapping and management?

Beginning with the value stream, it is simply a series of steps a business might take to deliver the desired value to the customers via their products or services. And value stream mapping (VSM) is the process of documenting, analysing and improving the flow of information (or materials) to facilitate the delivery of products or services the customers want. This allows you to identify and understand the steps you are taking (or should take) to ensure you are adding the value customers desire via a structured visualisation of your operational processes. Such visualisation allows you to collectively improve upon and optimise the collective processes via data-driven insights and not sacrifice value in one section at the expense of another. And value stream management allows you to increase value delivery from customer request to delivery by identifying and rectifying bottlenecks, silos and other inefficiencies within your process.

Mapping your supply chain and value stream

When it comes to your supply chain, supply chain mapping offers you similar insights to VSM, where you have a document allowing you to visualise all the touch points between companies, suppliers, vendors and others within the supply chain and understand the flow of data and materials. This further allows you to identify improvement opportunities, mitigate potential risks and plan for potential disruptions. Focusing on the components of entities and functions, you can be agile in response to any supply chain problems or unforeseen circumstances.

In addition to allowing you to mitigate risk, streamline the processes, optimise costs and strengthen your operations, supply chain mapping also allows you to identify where within the supply chain you are adding or losing value to your products or services. And with an understanding of different correlations between your stakeholders, supplier relationships, risks, costs, timings and data flow, the supply chain value stream can not only help you not only ensure timely fulfilment of your customers' expectations but ensure sustainable competitive advantage by continually adding to your value proposition. This is especially in the case of sales and fulfilment services, as value delivery to the customers is completely reliant on your ability to deliver the products (or services) to the customers and the efficiency of your supply chain.

Value stream management for a secure supply chain

Digital transformation of the modern supply chains has put global supply chain networks increasingly under attack, and a holistic approach, including value stream management, can help you protect your supply chain in the digital business ecosystem. In addition to allowing you to translate customers' needs into a business value proposition, VSM in supply chain and value stream management facilitates governance, insights and traceability throughout the supply chain. Additionally, the supply chain value stream allows you to maximise business outcomes, effectiveness and efficiency via insight-driven business strategy, waste minimisation and transparency within the supply chain. As a result, you can optimise value for your customers while ensuring optimal quality, cost and efficiency throughout your 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?

Infosys BPM Supply Chain Optimisation and Digital Supply Chain services partners with you on your journey to digitally transform and streamline your supply chain for future-proof and competitive operations. With our end-to-end solutions for Supply Chain as a Service, you can enable a future-ready, agile and responsive supply chain. Our dedicated Digital Supply Chain practices, extensive experience and expertise translate to world-class solutions across supply chain consulting, operations and digital transformation, including:

• Supply chain diagnostics
• Supply chain shared services advisory
• Supply chain control
• Forecasting and
• Inventory optimisation

You can leverage these to facilitate your supply chain value stream mapping and value stream management to identify where you are adding value to your products or services, better understand if your products match customer expectations and identify areas of improvement in the collective process.