It's time to Recognize Supply Chain as a Service(SCaaS)!!!

 Supply Chain as a Service

There are already a lot of companies out there that provide an outsourcing service for some portion of your Supply Chain. You can outsource your Manufacturing, Distribution, Procurement, Logistics, Accounts Payable, Transportation Management, Systems and more.

The future Digital Supply Chain will reinforce the need for companies to outsource, that is, to leverage Supply Chain as a service.

Why is it that way?

In order to leverage all available technologies, future companies will not have the expertise, resources and funding to try to do this on their own. Only the largest companies may want to keep this work in-house.

Advantages of moving to Digital Supply Chain

• End to end global electronic connectivity
• Improved productivity
• Lower cost
• Greater service
• Heightened flexibility 
• Adaptability
•  Better asset management.

Failure to make this progression will result in a lack of competitiveness and financial viability.

Companies will be forced to outsource more of their Supply Chain activities either for financial, resource, timing or competitive reasons.

Interestingly, these Supply Chain consulting and service companies will likely have the opportunity to become more vertically integrated into their service offerings.

This will also reinforce the need for everyone to have the capabilities of the Control Tower / Command Center. Again, it's best to let someone else develop and maintain a Control Tower platform and buy that service. But this technology will make it much easier to manage a variety of suppliers, regardless of the services they will all provide.

Challenges of SCaaS Deployment

Any customer of this service would have access to our tremendous spending leverage, high-level supplier relationships, advanced systems technology, world-class processes, industry-leading personnel, and superior supply chain performance.

But despite the phenomenal benefits that a potential customer would have had if they had engaged our Supply Chain as a Service offering, it proved to be incredibly difficult. Some of the problems that arose in procurement department are as follows

•  Every customer thinks he is an expert and knows more than you do. They take their expertise into any challenge as a personal affront.
• There is a natural doubt about whether you can deliver the benefits you claim you can provide
• They do not like the possibility of losing or giving up power.
• They have not made the logical leap that any of this operation is not necessarily their company'score competence.
•  They do not discuss the operational and strategic advantages of outsourcing
•  People have no appetite for improvement

It is reasonable assumption that any service provider would need to show its ability to deliver on its pledge.Compensation plans focused on results will help to keep those businesses on their toes. But if you don't recognize and develop plans of action to overcome these cultural obstacles, you won't make progress in providing or leveraging outsourced supply chain services.

The biggest blockade to future progress on the Supply Chain as a Service is not the technology, it is the people within the organization of your customers.

It's a valid problem to deal with people's issues.It won't be enough to get the best service to sell. If you offer SCaaS and you don't address cultural customer issues you 're not going to make much progress. When you are exporting aspects of the supply chain and you are not coping with the cultural problems of internal workers, you can not make any progress equally.

But the reality is that no matter how much SCaaS advances. Those strategic moves will be made by your competitors. If you don't, you are left behind and you are going to jeopardize the future of your business.