When To Hire Supply Chain Management Consultancy Firms

The pandemic, wars, natural calamities, so many disruptions are faced by supply chains today. The entire world is looking forward to resilient and sustainable supply chains.

The complexity of supply chains continues to multiply with increasing customer awareness, new channels (E-commerce, Organized retail), and new product categories (lifestyle products). Critical challenges faced are volatility in supply and demand, pressure to deliver more, constraints in talent availability, and skill gaps.

Maturity of the supply chain operations is key to organization’s success. Most companies struggle to keep pace with customers’ preferences and constant changes in the environment, technology, and business models. Potential markets and manufacturing base keeps changing. The only way to respond to these changes is by making supply chains agile, sustainable, and adaptable. Strong data capture, visibility, and analytical capability are the backbone of a robust supply chain.

To build next-generation supply chains, organizations should ask following questions –

• How many supply chains are needed? How to segment by a customer, product, geography, or channel?
• Where to compete: Speed? Agility? Service? Cost? Quality? Innovation?
• Where is the transformation needed? Does the current supply chain network meet the planned strategic business objectives?
• Which initiatives are needed to plan and configure controls in Digital Supply Chains?

To set up a customer-centric company, the essential requirements are a strong digital technology partner and simplified and appropriate technology. Companies need to understand customers’ buying behavior, supply needs, speed to the market, and response requirements. Further, innovation should be driven with the help of process experts, supplier-collaboration platforms, distributor-fulfillment partners, and 3PL/ 4PL providers.

Supply Chain Management Consultancy companies can help in many ways, such as increasing customer satisfaction, revenue growth, or minimizing costs and risks. Re-invention is the key, however mature the supply chain operations are. Several areas like End-to-end transformation, Performance benchmarking, SCM Planning, Network Optimization, and Digital Supply Chain are where TVS Supply Chain Solutions can offer its expertise.

Supply Chain Management Consultancy firms like TVS Supply Chain Solutions can help organizations handle disruptions better by reviewing every aspect of supply chain management, i.e., Plan, Source, Make & Deliver.

• Companies need to plan better to handle more product transitions or variations. Scenarios need to be built based on the demand.
• Companies need to adopt more flexible and agile sourcing processes and handle more comprehensive raw materials sets. Flexible sourcing arrangements with multiple suppliers will be helpful, and flexibility is needed in manufacturing and logistics practices.
• Companies need to build more flexibility in production lines at the ‘Make’ stage. Continuous focus on efficiencies and adopting lean ways will help keep costs low and productivity high.
• Companies should be able to adapt multiple channels for sales & delivery, but the key is the ability to do even last-minute customization. The entire supply chain needs to be sustainable; this includes having efficient network design, consolidated sourcing, manufacturing, storage, and optimal distribution practices.

Best supply chain management consultancy firms keep thrust on real-time planning and visibility. To build Agility, it is essential to build Digital Supply Network pulling together all the data to ensure the right time and real-time data availability.

Seamless and real-time communication across Suppliers, Partners and Customers is essential, ensuring network-wide insights from centralized and standardized data.

Intelligent Optimization is a must across People, Machines, Data-driven analytics, Predictive insights, and Proactive action, enabling customized solutions.

End-to-end transparency needs to be built using sensors and location-based services, IoT to get material flow tracking, schedule synchronization, and balance of supply and demand.

Key to Success

Consumer defines the supply chain requirements that need to be fulfilled to drive the company’s success. Supply Chain Management Consultancy firms adopt the following methodologies to ensure success.

• Tracking customer satisfaction concerning supply chain performance.
• Build E2E supply chain visibility.
• Break down main service level KPIs into sub-KPIs across the entire supply chain.
• Regularly review supply chain segmentation to maximize the perceived value.
• Run a segment-specific strategy for supply chain digitization.
• Leverage service innovators to boost innovation.
• Build ability to assess the impact of technology on Performance and costs.