Sunday, October 18, 2020

3 Core Supply Chain Strategies for Executives to remain Competitive

So here in this blog we will be looking into the three supply chain strategies that a supply chain executive should know to remain in the competition, where these strategies belong to the Industry 4.0 supply chain networks.


Strategy 1 – Real Time Network Based Architecture

Industries are already leveraging the advantages of this Network based customer services. Uber, Airbnb, Alibaba and Amazon have already deployed this network-based-architecture that provides multi-party capabilities across a network.

It is that network platform that enables all the capabilities along with providing control over the tower level visibility, collaboration, analytics, planning, and execution is core to future competitiveness. Even the simplest of transactions involve multiple parties, such as a customer, brand manager, co-packer, supplier, carrier, 3PL, and distributor.

This hub technology is designed to gather data in a point-to-point/spoke-to-hub fashion, decide what to do about changes in demand, capacity, or supply based on the hub variables in isolation, and then share some of the stale or latent data, post-processing, with some of their spokes, both inbound and outbound. 

Strategy 2 – Federated Master Data Management

Now-a-days data is considered to be our currency. The multiple ERP instances are similar to a federation of entities. This data/currency are currently trapped in our ERP pipeline instances and shared in a hub-and-spoke fashion in a one-to-one trade relationship with network partners. Also, those partners or the companies who has those data and export it to other data warehouse or data lake are creating latency and staleness in the data which devalues this currency in terms of decision making across network partners.

It is always better and handy to have a strategy where network trading partners opt into/onboard onto the network and share both their master and operating data with other trading partners based on a secure permissions framework across the network. This data exists only once and is federated to trading partners based on the permissions framework. Given that the data is not copied or duplicated between echelons, tiers, or nodes across the network, it is by definition real-time.

Also, we can increase the leverage on the data given that this type of item cross-referencing is built in as part of the architecture.

Strategy 3 – Actionable and Autonomous Prescriptive Analytics

Knowing the nature of network-based trade relationships, we will need to model that is the entire end-to-end supply chain network in order to correctly analyze and take action on problem resolution and opportunity creation. That is the only way where as a supply chain executive we can potentially benefit or at least limit the pain across all parties. Since these problems or opportunities exposed by the analytics could manifest in strategic, tactical, or operational timeframes, the foundation should be seamless, offering services, algorithms, and analysis that run across the network representation in real-time, whether we are solving problems predicted to happen in 6 months or during a delivery scheduled for later this afternoon. Also, if we as a supply chain executive have deployed Strategies 1 and 2, this foundation is already in place.

This end-to-end real-time supply network platform enables the ability to test out the new supply chain policies, network resiliency, the feasibility of strategic or tactical plans, activate alternate parts or suppliers, modify modes of transportation, or even add additional shifts at a plant.

There may be many ways actually to solve the problems related to demand, supply, logistics, and fulfilment in a network. The analytics workbenches must have the real-time access to every material variable in the network. Such that the traditional systems typically only give us the one way to solve a problem, due to static lead times and stale data

Summary

Thought the business continues to march toward digitization, companies must deploy strategies that provide the right foundation to compete on this basis. These three strategies outlined in this brief will provide the platform and architecture to enable this foundation and provide the capabilities to compete moving forward.

Happy Learning😀. Please share your valuable comments.

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