The COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit, the war in Syria and then in Ukraine and many other geopolitical tensions and natural disasters that happened in the last decade, have revealed the fragility and vulnerability of today's global supply chains. Supply chain efficiency significantly affects the organization's performance and prosperity, often bringing additional competitive advantage and differentiation to the market. Increasing supply chains' resilience to make them tolerable disruptions is a number one task for many organizations today.
This article explains why modern data connectivity solutions are critical when building a disruption-tough supply chain. Also, we provide you with three data integration strategies to increase the resilience of your supply chain and enable you to thrive amid potential disruption.
What is a resilient supply chain?
As scholars suggest, a resilient supply chain is a supply chain with the ability to prepare itself for and adapt to unexpected events and disruptions that might negatively affect its performance. Plus, it should be able to effectively function during a disruption, quickly recover to a pre-disruption state, and be agile enough to meet new demands when the customer or business partner needs change.
Organizations use several strategies to build supply chains capable of coping with supply chain shocks, such as optimizing production with better supply chain planning, understanding and leveraging data, diversifying suppliers and manufacturing partners, and implementing capacity and inventory buffers. All these result in a growing complexity of partner networks that should be properly integrated with your IT system. Otherwise, your supply chain performance will be questionable. And we can assure you that no one wants a resilient but inefficient supply chain.
To ensure your supply chain has the perfect balance of resilience and performance, it should meet these tenets:
- Rapid issue detection, response, and recovery
- End-to-end visibility and complete integration
- Data-driven supply chain control and management
- Greater transparency and collaboration of all supply chain stakeholders
- Effective demand planning processes.
Data integration is an essential element for supply chain resilience
Looking at the tenets outlined above, you can see that they revolve around data. Supply chain visibility and transparency are non-optional for organizations anymore. They should be able to capture real-time data and analyze it to make critical decisions promptly.
Efficient collaboration, in turn, implies a seamless exchange of data across all stakeholders involved in such a supply chain. Of course, effective planning and management are all about real-time error-free data flows. Thus, data integration is critical when an organization develops a resilient yet efficient supply chain strategy.
Data integration strategies to increase the resilience of your supply chain with no need to reinvent it completely
Ensuring a resilient supply chain with optimal performance is no easy task. Most supply chain leaders recognize that a lack of timely data from across their supply chains, manual processes, and dispersed data sources are what hold them back from success.
Below are three strategies that organizations should adopt to overcome the challenges mentioned above and ensure increased supply chain resilience with no need to reinvent it completely.
1. Supply chain digitization and process automation
Error-prone and inefficient paper-based processes, as well as manual data processing, are what should be discussed. By relying on data from faxes, emails, or phone calls manually entered into your system as spreadsheets, you cannot promptly react to any supply chain issue your company might encounter. You will achieve better supply chain operations efficiency by digitizing the most critical processes. As a next step, you need to digitalize the data exchange with all stakeholders to achieve process automation.
Modern cloud-based data integration solutions will help you in this endeavor. With their help, you can easily unlock the power of valuable real-time data you can leverage to enable data-driven decision-making and enable process automation.
With your supply chain digitalized, you can achieve efficient warehouse management or supply chain execution and enjoy real-time data analytics and decision-making that will allow you to eliminate any inefficiency in your supply chain before it appears.
2. Improved supply chain collaboration throughout full integration
Information is the lifeblood of modern supply chains; thus, achieving close stakeholder collaboration is what you cannot omit. Supply chain integration pulls all your internal stakeholders and business partners out of their data silos to support interconnected and interdependent supply chains. By making supply chain data accessible to all stakeholders, organizations can increase collaboration leading to a better-organized and reinforced supply chain. This way, stakeholders can share information in real-time to work towards a common goal and commit to continuous supply chain improvements, boosting supply chain efficiency. As a result, you can expect an emphasized and reinforced supply chain.
Modern data connectivity solutions can make all parties speak the same language without needing to amend IT systems or data formats. So, with the right data integration tool or data integration service, achieving improved supply chain collaboration and stakeholder integration is a relatively easy task.
3. Complete visibility across the supply chain
Supply chain visibility (SCV) is all about the ability to track parts, complete products and ready-to-sell goods while they are in transit from A to B. Today, when organizations rely on diverse networks of suppliers and have complex supply chain architectures, SCV should not be neglected.
By leveraging modern end-to-end visibility solutions, organizations can get a complete overview of their supply chains through seamless data sharing across all stakeholders. This way, companies can enable efficient inventory and production planning and agilely react to external factors and supply chain disruptions to avoid bottlenecks and impending supply chain shortages before they become severe.
So, if improved process efficiencies, reduced risks, and increased business profits and customer satisfaction is what you are aiming for, achieving visibility across the supply chain is a strategy you need to focus on.
To learn more about SCV and its benefits, we recommend you read Achieving Supply Chain Visibility Through Modern Data Connectivity Solutions blog providing you with a complete picture.
Full visibility and closer collaboration, combined with process automation and improved quality and data accuracy, will help you enhance your supply chain to make it well-prepared to combat supply chain issues. Also, such a robust partner network will give you an additional competitive advantage and become a driver for further business growth.
Using the information provided above, you can make necessary improvements in your supply chain to make it prepared for potential disruptions. However, often, a lack of required knowledge and skills in-house, as well as an 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it' attitude makes organizations avoid supply chain improvements. This problem is only worsened by a fear of the complexities involved in overhauling paper-based processes and siloed operations and systems.
The beauty of modern data connectivity solutions like Youredi is that you can start this process with no or very few changes to your existing IT system. When your organization sees the added value of this move, it will be much easier to move forward further and ensure complete digitalization and visibility across the supply chain. As a result, you will be closer to your ultimate goal - building a more resilient and effective supply chain to thrive amid disruption.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us via this form or at talktous@youredi.com
