Building an effective supply chain strategy is tough. With supply chains undergoing digital transformation, many companies are grappling with new ways to improve overall operations and performance, especially in a post-pandemic world. They’ve started emphasizing strategic supply chain management tools to overcome these challenges.

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The supply chain challenge is an ongoing conflict that isn’t fading away anytime soon. A solid strategic approach allows organizations to act fast, avoid vulnerabilities and mitigate risks.

What Is a Supply Chain Strategy?

A supply chain strategy is a process that manages networks and services between suppliers and companies without causing friction. They include decision-making and analytical processes that define roadmaps for products, services and market interactions. It must involve end-to-end supply chain processes like sourcing goods, delivery and logistics.

Implementing the best supply chain management strategy is key to improving operational efficiency, enabling profits and reducing overall costs.

Every organization needs supply chain management strategies to fulfill demand, build a great network, drive customer loyalty, improve responsiveness and more.

At its core, a successful strategy consists of five key capabilities:

1. Supply Sense: Determine possible supply options.
2. Supply Response: Check operations that can make your supply chain functional, i.e., asset management, manufacturing and more.
3. Decision Making: Ensure there’s end-to-end supply chain planning.
4. Demand: Monitor and understand customer needs.
5. Demand Response: Fulfill customer demand by facilitating order fulfillment processes.

Incorporate all of these capabilities when developing end-to-end supply chain strategies for your business. Your overall goal should be to provide customers with the best service and products at a profitable margin.

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Types

The main four types of supply chain strategies are client-centric, predictive business, visibility and smart automation. Let’s get deeper into the discussion and see what these methods entail.

Client-centric

Fulfilling client demand is the most significant function of supply chain management, especially with the rising digital trends. However, this won’t be possible without automating processes that focus on the client’s needs first. For example, you’ll need to maximize forecasting accuracy from multiple sources in real time to understand your client’s requirements.

This method helps incorporate information from structured and unstructured data. This data gives you accurate information on sentiment analysis, point of sale, social media activities, emails, number of orders and so on. Altogether, it allows you to analyze actual demand to make better decisions and improve overall performance.

Predictive Business

As the term infers, predictive tools manage and adjust shipments based on things like weather or traffic. This capability is possible thanks to technologies like digital twins, a cutting-edge tool that helps businesses build and manage multiple networks. By providing a framework between IoT sensors and your systems, you can achieve complete visibility of your entire network’s assets, products and equipment.

It includes the machinery within your system, commercial assets, products and more. The more information you can gather about product performance, the better you’ll understand customer requirements. It also helps detect disruptions before they happen.

Visibility

Supply chain visibility provides real-time insights on goods that are still in transit or production. You can analyze real-time weather pattern, accident and traffic jam disruption updates to see how they impact sales.

These insights enable better collaboration across manufacturing industries, warehouses, partners and distribution centers. Extended supply chain visibility helps streamline cross-border transactions, reduce exposure during product recalls and maximize sustainability across your global supply chain.

Smart Automation

With a smart automation strategy in play, you can utilize warehousing solutions to streamline processes between systems, human workers and robots to achieve multiple benefits such as:

• Mass product customization.
• Improved delivery and distribution processes.
• Flexibility to eliminate carrying costs.

Cutting-edge technology like 3D printing for mass manufacturing is one way to achieve reduced carrying costs and better flexibility.

Determining successful supply chain management strategies is key to supporting your customer base and retaining a competitive edge.

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Implementation

There are multiple factors to consider when implementing the right plan. There’s no one size fits supply chain strategy, and it will differ based on your industry. Here are some key considerations:

Identify Demand Types

Identify the type of demand your business regularly faces. Is it seasonal, linear or consistent? How often do you make shipments? Are there frequent fluctuations? If so, are they weekly or monthly? What strategies or tools do you use for demand forecasting?

Answering these specific questions can help you during the initial phase of your supply chain strategy.

Understand the Product Portfolio

If you manufacture multiple products within the same business, the same strategy probably won’t work for them all. A seasonal or cyclical demand market coupled with linear and constant demand curves can complicate things further.

Companies must consider implementing different supply chain strategies for individual product lines to optimize supply and demand simultaneously.

Know Your Customer’s Location

Most often overlooked, the customer’s location also plays an important role in strategy implementation. Knowing their physical location shows how their shipments work. Having insight into their location allows you to implement the right supply chain strategy for regional or global shipments.

Manage Inventory

Inventory management is key to managing an efficient supply chain. Real-time updates give you an idea about inventory size, nature and complexity. You can use this information to determine which supply chain strategy to implement.

Know Your Suppliers’ Locations

Besides customer location, identifying where your suppliers are is equally significant. For example, if your suppliers are from another country, lead times will likely be longer than those from within the same region.

This aspect will affect both your shipping inventory processes. Make sure to consider this factor when implementing a supply chain management strategy.

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Top Strategies

If you’re concerned about your supply chain not functioning properly, consider these supply chain management strategies.

Maintain Agility

How quickly can your business adjust to ever-changing market expectations? An agile supply chain keeps you up to speed. It helps react to significant supply chain changes like shipment delays or unexpected incidences to stay competitive and fulfill customer requirements.

Agility is key to building an effective supply chain strategy. A contingency plan helps your business stay competitive and prepared for unexpected disasters. Some examples include:

• Integrating smart warehousing and technology.
• Collaboration with multiple manufacturers.
• Stocking inventory in multiple distribution centers.

Reinforce Partnerships

Strengthening relationships with multiple suppliers and partners can create competitive supply chains. It improves delivery service, quality and market share while reducing product development cycles. Not having trusted partnerships can cause certain limitations.

Open-ended communication leads to better decision-making and exchange of information, i.e., demand data, sharing costs and more to ensure ongoing improvement.

Upgrade Technology

With technology becoming smarter, you’ll find many solutions to optimize and streamline supply chains. Some major ways include employing best-in-breed logistics and supply chain management tools.

For instance, deploying a transportation management system (TMS) in conjunction with supply chain or ERP solutions can improve visibility, automation, transportation planning, freight management execution and more.

Put the Customer First

Today, customers expect fast and reliable solutions. Developing a customer-centric supply chain strategy begins by understanding their perspective. It’s vital to address your end consumer’s expectations for product features, price, quality, purpose and more.

Developing a customer-centric supply chain takes time and effort. You’ll need innovative ways to meet customer demand and exceed their expectations. However, everything will work in your favor if you get it right.

Gather Data

Data is king. Gathering as much information as possible is essential if you’re looking to improve decision-making. Without actionable data, supply chains are weak.

With supply chain analytics, businesses can use quantitative and qualitative methods to improve business decisions. It provides beyond traditional datasets for analysis and applies statistical methods to create new insights.

Invest in Cybersecurity

As digitization takes over, cyber threats are increasing at an alarming rate, and your supply chain may not be as secure as you think. Though it may seem challenging to build your supply chain with cybersecurity in mind, you should.

According to research by the NCC Group, the number of cyber attacks on supply chains jumped nearly 51% from July to December 2021. With the number of attacks likely to increase, companies need to start investing in cybersecurity strategies with the latest network security technology.

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Conclusion

Developing a supply chain strategy is a multifaceted, challenging process. You need to have an open mind when creating business strategies to avoid the effects of supply chain disruptions.

We’ve covered some important strategies for you to start developing a plan. Which supply chain strategy did we miss? How are you building a supply chain strategy to be successful long-term? Tell us with a comment!