4 Steps to Supercharge Your Supply Chain

In the rapidly evolving digital era, businesses are realising outdated supply-chain technologies are not only hampering growth through excessive and burdensome administration, but also preventing them from creating a future-proof infrastructure and setting a foundation for long-term success.

1. Review who you buy from 

If you’re dealing with a lot of inventory, supplier management can be a nightmare. “Who am I buying what from and when?!”

When was the last time you had a review of what suppliers you work with? Is there a way that you can condense your list of suppliers so they’re easier to manage? Are there any suppliers you just buy one product from that could be supplied by someone else to cut down your list?

Review and re-structure your suppliers so there’s less of them to deal with.

2. Purge your product list –

Similar to the above, managing your inventory is easier if there’s less inventory to manage.

Are there any products sitting on your shelves that have been there for months and months? Do you regularly review your fast movers and slow movers and adjust accordingly? If you were to use the pareto principle you may even find that 20% of your inventory is responsible for 80% of your revenue (but don’t hold us to that).

Less products doesn’t necessarily mean less revenue. Focus on the most important and you may find your cash flow improves.

3. Question the quality

It’s all well and good to have goods delivered to you promptly, but not so good if the majority of them are sent back.

Is there a way for you to track your purchase return process? You may find that, despite goods being delivered quickly, there’s a lot of goods sent back. This will cause delays and add unnecessary complexity into your operation.

Question every supplier, track the volume of returns and cut based on quality.

4. Reserve, don’t react

We all want to please our customers, but in reacting to last minute demands we run the risk of upsetting others and causing unexpected bottlenecks.

Are you managing expectation with your customers? Are you reserving goods for the customers that requested them first? By making sure you make your customers aware of likely lead times, and by ensuring that demand is dealt with sequentially, you’ll end up with happier customers and, all being well, a much smoother operation.

Don’t react straight away, focus on maintaining excellent levels of customer service and prioritise.

For a further conversation about how we may be able to help if you're struggling with the above. E-mail me using [email protected]