Art of Solutioning in Supply Chain

One of the aspects of my job that really excites me is to curate solutions for clients's supply chain problems.

My approach to solutioning has been a 3 step process:

Step 1: Understanding the client

Prioritize the efforts in understanding the below points (list is non-exhaustive):

• Client's priority
• Client's technological roadmap
• Client's supply chain Operations maturity level
• As-Is process.
• Available Interventions

Step 2: Understand the pain points and design To-Be process

Prioritize efforts in understanding what is the desired state for the client and what are the roadblocks:

• What are the important KPIs for clients
• Which are the crucial processes that directly / indirectly impact these KPIs
• Defining the To-Be process.
• Interventions required to achieve To-Be process in terms of people, process or technology based.

Ideally, everyone needs a solution that is quick to implement and is cost-effective. However, it is the job of a solution architect to understand if the solution required shall be a point solution to address a very specific function/ process gap in the supply chain or shall it be an integrated platform-based solution that will not only solve this problem but will tie all the loose ends across the supply chain.

The integrated platform solution promises a much more sophisticated supply chain that is resilient, flexible, and provides better control and visibility but at the expense of extra effort in terms of cost and implementation time. Point solution, on the other hand, targets the low hanging fruits - the solutions that are cost-effective and quick to implement (often required by most clients). But these are often unscalability, not flexible in nature.

Step 3: Designing the solution (could be interventions based on Human, Technology or Process) to overcome these roadblocks

The type of interventions that are designed and deployed are most often dependent on the client's technological road-map and operations maturity.

Few Examples of:

Point solution: setting up individual #RPA bots for inventory forecasting, inventory optimization and Logistics management.

Integrated platform solution: #BlueYonder, #Kinaxis, #O9, #SAP, #Oracle.

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