Moving from Product-Centric Supply Chains to Customer-Centric Supply Chains requires an organisational, process, solution and cultural paradigm shift. Being able to provide a real-time view of inventory to customers with full access to the global product catalogue, optimising stock levels at each node in the Supply Chain (including 3rd party locations) to maximise service levels whilst minimising waste, ensuring order fulfilment meets all SLAs with proactive updates & actions throughout, and injecting the voice of the customer into the product design lifecycle – all these are achievable within the Customer-Centric Supply Chain.
It starts by ensuring that the Supply Chain is modelled in it is entirety, with constraints & risks being identified and mitigated, processes optimised, and technology solutions deployed to improve visibility & efficiency whilst eliminating silos.
Then, by looking at the customer journeys and expectations and the end-to-end processes across the extended value chain that will deliver those, a blueprint is created, that is used to form the target solution with the necessary integration points, data flows and security model.
As Supply Chains evolve over time, with new channels or sources being added, either organically, through partnerships or through acquisitions, the complexity increases. Those additions often have their own processes & systems, as well as their own inventory holding.
Furthermore, those sales channels can have their own inventory pool, creating duplication & excess working capital – for example, within multi-channel organisations, many e-commerce sites will have their own fulfilment centre set up for small order quantity picking & distribution, as opposed to the bulk picking required for a depot network, leading to customer frustration at differing stock availabilities by channel. Alternatively, an acquisition or partnership will bring its own product catalogue with the associated hierarchies, that will need harmonising with the existing in order to present a single view to customers.
Our Connected Supply Chain ManagementXT solution starts with understanding (or establishing when required) your end-to-end architecture and putting in place meaningful building blocks.
The expert teams at InspireXT utilise the common process model by collaborating with your business champions to craft a tailored guideline that suits your business operation. It then becomes a blueprint and a basis for the successful implementation of a Connected Supply ChainXT.
Many clients tell us that managing a customer order journey through a diverse range of steps as well as keeping the customer informed in real time are some of the challenges, they face in ever evolving multi-channel environment.
This can be due to silos that exist between the channels and actors involved in the process. Efficiently and cost-effectively meeting a customer promise requires not only internal business functions but also many external stakeholders such as Carriers, Payment Providers, and Suppliers to work together.
Order management and orchestration solutions that can orchestrate the order journey from capture to fulfilment and manage the complexity with relevant automation will greatly enhance your customers’ experience, reinforced by jeopardy management that monitors the process and proactively alerts where the SLA is at risk of being missed – enabling corrective action to keep it on track.
The world continues to be more connected, and your products and services are reaching new geographies. With our Connected Supply ChainXT solution, you can onboard new channels quickly without disrupting to your business operations – including 3rd party drop ship vendors who can extend your range, or 3rd party sales channels and marketplaces who will extend your reach. These integrations can range from extensive & real time to basic & batch depending on the capabilities available within that new channel.
Your customers are more likely to engage if the product catalogue is consistent, and comprehensive and conveys the same information to all channels they engage in.
Not only do you need to keep product taxonomies in check, but all other operational matters such as languages, prices, promotions, and stock availability information play equally important roles.
You may also have some regional restrictions due to regulations or safety or regulatory reasons. With our Connected Supply ChainXT solution we will provide solution guidelines for standardized capabilities and meaningful extensibility that product stewards and orders can implement to greatly reduce time to value.
If your business has the luxury of unlimited inventory and working capital, perhaps this might not be a challenge for you, however, many want to achieve more with less.
If you are amongst the ones needing to protect margins, and conserve cash, then utilising a technology-enabled solution will be the right answer for you. The solution must converge your channels, suggest how much to buy, or make, and how to deliver on customer promises.
With our Connected Supply ChainXT solution, we enable efficient stock strategies including providing all your demand channels with the most accurate and dependable information to serve your customers.
Whether it is Discrete or Process or Mixed manufacturing, we have the right ‘solution components’ and ‘formulas’ to serve your shopfloor needs and ensure that the Quality does not suffer.
Capture data and documents from your resources in real-time (be it people, equipment, or processes), analyse and identify bottlenecks and increase your operational efficiency to reduce resource and energy consumption. Not to mention proactive upkeep of your equipment to reduce downtimes, enable alternatives to be planned, and to ensure minimal impact on operational throughput.
With our Connected ShopfloorXT, digitizing your shopfloor has never been easier. In industries such as pharmaceuticals, where compliance and regulatory norms are expected to be 100%, our offerings empower you and provide the confidence to always sustain them.
Many businesses offer their products in multiple configurations, many have customers requiring visibility across agreements and terms, and almost all have external supply bases needing to detach the physical supply chain from the financial supply chain.
Customers love choices but also want simple options and predictable delivery and fulfilment timeframe. Offering a simplified experience can add business process and systems complexity, and many businesses start to create silos. In a multi-channel getting your product or service across to your customer faster is the key, financial compliance should just happen behind the scenes, automatically.
With our Connected Supply ChainXT solution, you can progressively break away from these silos by connecting your demand channels to a common process model, which takes care of the complexity, so your operations continue to do what they do best, make available great products and services.
Process review & design, including internal and external stakeholders.
Leading practices supported by enabling technology.
Outline configurable and flexible solutions that can respond to changing business needs.
Enhance capabilities – adding new ones or improving existing ones – based on robust solution architecture.
Pragmatic implementation approach from concept through to deployment with phasing options
Find out more about how we can help your organisation navigate its next. Let us know your areas of interest so that we can serve you better.
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