Best Supply Chain Practices To Be A Sustainable Global Leader
The fundamental reason for any global MNC company to be leader in its segment is its highly efficient supply chain. Every industry including Consumer Products, Ecommerce, Technology, Fast Food chain, FMCG, Automobile, Electronics, Chemicals, Pharmaceuticals, etc., need to have an ethical and sustainable supply chain to be a market leader.
To achieve such core competencies across geographies, every organization needs to follow three key trends: be a customer-driven partner organization, adopt advanced analytics in its operations and have strong focus on corporate social responsibility.
Building its strategies upon these three trends would definitely build brand value; develop cordial relations with suppliers, partners, and customers to provide value added solutions; improve performance across the supply chain; and enable an organization to gather opportunities and mitigate risks and drive its competitive advantage.
Customer Driven Value Network (Pull System):
Raising the bar of performance in terms of continuously engaging customers and having a demand driven value network, many companies have learned the art of providing solutions to customer requirements. This can be further achieved by having centralized customer service center to monitor issues, standardization of best practices for manufacturing products and providing services; and achieving economies of scale by catering to many customers staying relatively close to the regional organizational hubs.
Delivering a tailored response to customer needs can be met by using Internet of Things (IOT) based solutions which involves remote monitoring and management of electronic durables in different locations and using sensors and embedded software to provide real time tracking for replenishment of inventory. Such instant information transfer would help all stakeholders across the supply chain to efficiently plan demand, source components, make products, deliver to customers and significantly eliminate bullwhip effect and minimize costs.
Adoption of Advanced Analytics:
Use of analytics is essential to run multiple operations spanning the entire supply chain and gain insights from them to further take strategic decisions. Running of machine learning algorithms on historical sales data and customer feedback data helps to predict the demand and identify potential factors of risk.
Artificial intelligence has to be used to analyze digital photographs of products from source through manufacturing till delivery to spot negative patterns and identify quality problems raised by the consumers.
Capturing real time information from suppliers, vendors, customers, manufacturing and distribution nodes, logistic partners and applying advanced analytics can significantly help to generate recommendations and aid daily decision making.
Corporate Social Responsibility:
Apart from achieving financial profitability and providing value addition to customers, another aspect which companies need to focus upon is providing social value by running socially responsible sustainable supply chains and gaining attention of investors who also focus upon company’s handling of environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors.
Having manufacturing facilities with minimal waste, Increased transparency and complying with Environmental regulations are few initiatives which are part of the promise which organizations have to keep to attract more customers, increase brand value, identify and mitigate ESG risks that could cost them if not kept under strict check.
Global supply chain leaders like Apple, P&G, Unilever, McDonald’s, Amazon, Intel, etc. are few organizations consistently adopting the best practices and the above mentioned key trends and continue to be global leaders in their respective domains fuelling growth, providing value and delivering best products and services to the customers.
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