SUPPLY CHAIN STRATEGY

• Do you have one Supply Chain Strategy for all businesses, customers, geography & channels? 

• Are the cross-functional leaders not involved in arriving at Supply Chain strategy?    

• Does your Supply Chain department claims to be performing well whereas customers still complain?

If the answer to any of the questions above is "yes" then you need to align the Supply Chain strategy with customer & business goals. One strategy doesn't fits all the business models or categories of customers. We follow a very structured approach to integrate & differentiate Supply Chain strategy in line with the businesses.

SUPPLY CHAIN PROCESS AUDIT AND BENCHMARKING

Our Supply Chain Audit checklist runs from end to end processes and figures out gaps not only within a process but also disconnects between various processes. The methodology is based on SCOR (Supply Chain Operations Reference) based on key processes of Plan, Source, Make, Deliver and Return.

Based on self-assessment, challenged by our experts, your supply chain team itself will come up with the following outputs:

• Supply Chain Maturity level on a scale of 1 to 10 and future roadmap

We drill down each of the Supply Chain processs into basic elements and rate each against the best practices on a scale of 1 to 10. The outcome of the exercise is the current maturity level of your Supply Chain. The broad classification of maturity levels are:

1. Informal Organization
2. Functional Organization
3. Integrated Supply Chain
4. Extended Enterprise

Once there is an agreement and acceptance of the current status within the organization, we help you to draw a roadmap for future with specific milestones.

No strategy is good if doesn't provide a competitive edge over competitors. We identify both customer faced & internal efficiency related parameters, that a company believes are critical for gaining an edge over competitors. We conduct a study of these parameters within the industry your company competes and rate your performance as "average" or "superior" for each of the parameters.  The study includes interacting with your customers & customers of your competitors to validate the results.

We help you to identify gaps on these parameters viz a viz your competitors  and draw an improvement agenda for the organization. We also provide expertise on tools e.g. QIT (Quality Improvement Team), Six Sigma, Small Improvement Initiatives etc. for carrying out improvements.

• Opportunity Assessment

Having identified the roadmap & specific improvement agenda, it is important to prioritize initiatives. We work with your team, understand  preparedness of the organization, aseess requirement of resources and help you to prioritize improvement initiatives.

We appreciate the fact that each organization has a different culture, so one approach doesn't work for all. We don't stop at suggesting and prioritizing the initiatives but help you in step by step implementation by becoming part of your extended team. We transfer knowledge at each step & get buy-in from all the stakeholders.

The specific meterics designed for each initiatives ensure that the desired results are achived within reasonable time-frame. We also document the improved processes & train your people on these processes using inhouse training programs and e-learning programs.

SUPPLY NETWORK DESIGN

• Geographical Flow

The goods geographic flow, many times, is sub-optimized and determined by manufacturing cost & capacity optimization. Similarly supplier to factory flow is primarily determined by supplier's unit price and business share.

We use TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) template to align geographical linkages & flows taking into account manufacturing, logistics & inventory carrying costs and at the same time providing room for flexibility.

• Network Optimization:

Supply network design determined by:

• Is the product Made to Stock, Made to Order or Engineered to Order?

• How long your customers are willing to wait, once they place an order?

• Are you looking for responsiveness or efficiency?

• Is there a sufficient load to a destination to meet service and cost objectives?

The outputs of network design are:

• Locations of decoupling points

• Stocking policy at each decoupling point

Our network optimization methodology is practical & simple and can be used by the functional managers for reviewing the network design.

DEMAND & SUPPLY PLANNING

All plans are inaccurate and therefore, need for frequent planning & review. The components of Demand & Supply planning are:

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Demand Forecasting Tools (APO, i2) and Process Linkages with Business Plan Consensus agreement between stakeholders Sales & Operations Planning Rough Cut Capacity planning Tools Master production Scheduling Materials Requirement Planning Measurement of Accuracy & Reliability Performance Updating & maintaining planning master data Cleaning  demand history

Key decisions in Demand & Supply Planning Process Design:
• Cycle of Planning : Monthly / Weekly / Daily
• Planning Horizon: Month / Quarter / Annual
• Planning Buckets : Daily / Weekly / Monthly / Mix of All

We help organizations to implement right cycles  & models of demand & supply planning and tools to enable it.

SALES & OPERATIONS PLANNING

Sales and Operations Planning is a critical link between the Business Planning and Operations Planning. It is typically a monthly & high level process, participated by functional leaders. The key decisions made in the process are:

• Agreed medium term demand forecast (3-12 months)
• Production volumes & capacity alignment
• Inventory plan including seasonal buildup
• Back up plans based on what-if scenarios & sensitivity analysis
• Alignment between Operations Planning & Financial Planning.
 
                                                                  

The Sales & Operations Planning process is preceeded by Deamand & Supply Planning steps  and  culminates into Executive S&OP Meeting.  This meeting is attended by top management (Sales, Marketing, Supply Chain, Finance, Technical) and chaired by Business or Market head.  We help organizations to structure S&OP process with the right categorization & aggregation of product families and performance measures, to enable appropriate decision making.

BALANCE SCORECARD

What are the attribute of your Supply Chain measurement? Does it measure performance from all the angles of Customer, Financial, Stakeholder values? Are all the measures aligned, prioritized & balanced?

It has been normally observed that the Supply Chain performance measures are heavily focused on inventories & costs whereas customer facing measures are secondary. Many of the measures conflict with each other ( e.g. cost vs. flexibility), therefore  balancing of these measures becomes an arduous task. The internal focused performance results  in high customer dissatisfaction and even loss of business.  

We help organizations to arrive at the balance scorecard template, measures & targets based on supply chain strategy and benchmarking.