Supply Chain - Supply Chain Management
Supply Chain Management (SCM) excellence focuses on the integration of strategy, processes, organisations and systems, and there are very significant correlations between Supply Chain effectiveness and overall business performance.
SCM is a complex discipline, and achieving the right balance between methods of buying, moving and storing goods involves juggling a lot of balls at once, but getting it right is extraordinarily rewarding. Good practice can immediately take a lot of non-value added waste out of your processes, and perhaps more importantly make you more competitive.
RESCU Solutions offers to help you improve the management of your supply chain by introducing best practice initiatives to reduce your cost base, and improve your customer service and competitiveness.
Understanding your Supply Chain.
It is important to understand the information flow requirements between stages of the supply chain. Starting with the needs of its customers, a company must determine how its supply chain is enabling or hindering its efforts to meet those needs.
RESCU Solutions initial approach to SCM involves a thorough diagnostics check of your current supply chain processes. This involves collecting information on how you store, handle and ship goods; how you utilise information; and importantly how you deal with customers and suppliers.
Accurate measurements of forecast accuracy, inventory accumulations throughout the chain, order processing costs, defects, delays and returns are crucial to help understand where the largest targets of opportunity might exist.
RESCU Solutions’ consultants all have substantial hands on SCM experience and will frequently uncover cost management opportunities in the following areas:
- Commercial relationships and transactions
- Process and product complexity
- New product implementation
- Forecasting and planning
- Knowledge management
- Inventory management
- Warehousing and materials handling
- Physical distribution
- Site location
- Who manages improvement?
RESCU Solutions endeavour to identify high value improvement opportunities for all of our clients through embracing initiatives such as supplier partnerships, JIT, vertical integration, or improved utilisation of technology.
The internet in particular enables firms to share information at a very low cost and creates valuable opportunities for supply chain integration and cost reduction. For example, real time information sharing has lead to benefits for our clients including:-improvements in manufacturing flexibility, increased customer responsiveness and enabled overall cost reductions to be achieved.
Optimising the Supply Chain
Changes to one element in the supply chain are likely to affect the cost and/or performance of other processes. The process of optimising should in theory give the best fit between all the conflicting processes in the business. Most large businesses, and many small ones, have such complex systems that the job of collecting enough data in enough detail to provide an accurate optimisation is a mammoth undertaking.
In the future, next generation supply chain tools will focus on collaboration and information availability more than speed and efficiency and support three fundamental characteristics: transparency, flexibility and synchronicity.