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How supply chain drives competitive advantage

How Supply chain drives competitive advantage

OVERVIEW

While supply chains share some common similarities, each is also unique in its specific combination of manufacturers, raw materials, logistics, organizations and goods. There are many points of differentiation in your supply chain, but the question comes how can you use that to your competitive advantage?

In this blog, we will go through some of the unique aspects of a supply chain and elaborate how you can use those distinctions and disparities to gain a competitive advantage and maximize profits.

You will get to know how to take advantage of:

  • Manufacturing of materials, raw ingredients, and other goods
  • Whether logistics arrangements are in-house or third-party
  • Alterations in supply and demand management
  • Operational processes within and between supply chain organizations
  • Managing relationship with supply chain stakeholders
  • Documentation and administration in the supply chain

In-House Manufacturing VS Outsourced Manufacturing

There are some larger organizations having capital and resources to manufacture their own products, either from pre-made parts or raw ingredients. Other organizations will outsource their manufacturing to white-label providers.

Supply Chain Competitive Advantage From In-House Manufacturing

There are various ways to benefit your in-house manufacturing capabilities:

  • Carrying out deep analysis of every aspect of the manufacturing process will help identify issues and holdups.
  • Introducing managed continual improvement processes will enhance quality, manufacturing speed, accuracy and efficiency.
  • Take advantage of efficient product development through early prototyping, iterating and testing on product designs and new features.
  • Maximize cost control of materials, people, equipment and manufacturing processes.

Supply Chain Competitive Advantage From Outsourced Manufacturing

Supply chain management can establish processes and relationships with external manufacturers, too:

  • Implementing strong service level agreements with penalty clauses will help to meet efficiency or quality goals.
  • Taking benefit of economies of scale to get lower-cost manufacturing, especially if completed overseas.
  • Scale up manufacturing more quickly as demand grows.
  • Put contingency planning in place with other manufacturers in case issues prevent your existing manufacturer from meeting targets.

Integrated Logistics VS Outsourced Logistics

Building up internal warehousing, logistics and distribution is a major attempt. Other businesses may choose to outsource some or all of their logistics needs.

Logistics inhouse vs outsourced

Supply Chain Competitive Advantage From Integrated Logistics

Resource-intensive, integrated logistics offers up some big advantages:

  • Distribution management is essential to ensure quick collection and delivery of goods to downstream organizations or end customers
  • Establishing safe, secure and environmentally-appropriate storage for all raw materials, ingredients and products.
  • Get greater clarity of goods wherever they are in the storage or distribution system
  • Avoid paying unnecessary overheads that increase the profits of outsourced logistics companies.

Supply Chain Competitive Advantage From Outsourced 3PL Providers

It may be a little harder to comprehend advantages from 3PL providers, but it’s still possible:

  • Use warehouse and storage flexibility to adjust storage and distribution needs in line with customer demand
  • Move goods around the 3PL warehouse and distribution network so they’re closer to customers
  • Take advantage of existing relationships between the 3PL provider and their partner organizations
  • Negotiate through economies of scale to bring down logistics costs and arrange for fixed pricing

Flexible Demand and Supply Management

Good demand and supply management is necessary to managing inventory levels, keeping enough stock, assure short manufacturing cycles and getting products into the hands of consumers.

supplychainconsulting-managing inventory

Supply Chain Competitive Advantage From Flexible Demand and Supply Management

  • To ensure stock levels will meet demand, get early sight of new product releases and marketing efforts.
  • Take in use of AI modelling and machine learning to predict demand and measure seasonal demand and supply trends.
  • For increases in demand prepare manufacturers and other suppliers and bring in other organizations to deal with scaling up production.
  • Using predictive and prescriptive analytics will help to understand the impact of demand and supply on the overall supply chain and optimize SCM.

Supply Chain Process Management

Supply chain managers spend ample amount of time managing supply chain processes. It’s not surprising that understanding and conducting those processes can result in huge productivity and cost savings.

Process Management

Supply Chain Competitive Advantage From Effective Supply Chain Process Management

The main benefits here come from visibility, reducing waste, distributing and reducing rework or duplication:

  • To identify holdups and inefficiencies measure every sector throughout the supply chain.
  • Create supply chain improvement initiatives into contracts and service level agreements with other organizations in the supply chain.
  • Maintaining documents, metrics, contracts and other details in the block chain for maximum clarity and verifiability.
  • To avoid rework, manual errors or duplication of effort move organizations onto a single, integrated supply chain management software platform.

Supplier Relationship Management

Good relationship management between suppliers and manufacturers will conduct the production and flow of goods and remove friction.

Supply Chain Competitive Advantage From Robust Supplier Relationship Management

Considering suppliers like partners and collaborators is a good way to get them unified and prepared to take extra steps to assure quality and speed:

  • Pay suppliers immediately when block chain or IoT technology concludes that goods have been shipped or received.
  • To overcome language and other barriers with suppliers use integrated natural language processing.
  • Collaborate with suppliers on quality improvement initiatives and fund process optimization.
  • Request clarity into supplier datasets for manufacturing and other processes, then carry out analysis and provide intelligence and insights back to the supplier.

Supply Chain Document Management

The supply chain generates a huge amount of documentation, including contracts, shipping notifications, bills of lading, purchase orders, service level agreements and much more. Supply chain management can significantly minimize the administrative overhead to speed up document processing and conduct the production and transfer of goods.

supplychainconsulting documentation

Supply Chain Competitive Advantage From Reducing the Burden of Document Management

Nobody likes producing or managing documents, so there’s plenty that can be done to make the whole process less painful:

  • Use machine learning to translate documents into other languages.
  • Collect and verify documents on the block chain including digital signing and tracking.
  • Go through documents like bills of lading or shipping notices with unique identification through IoT devices or other tags.
  • Measure performance against service level agreements in a centralized location for greater visibility of targets and thresholds.

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