How to Establish a New Supply Chain in your Business?

How to Establish a New Supply Chain in your Business

Building a Supply Chain is not easy. It does not happen overnight. It does not happen without investment, resources and a sense of direction.

Imagine trying to build something without knowing what it was that you were building. How would you ever know what you built was any good? 

You simply cannot determine if the thing you are building is good, if it is fit for purpose or if it meets the expectations of those who needed to build it unless you know what the thing needs to be.


Let's take your Supply Chain. 

You need the Supply Chain to be built to deliver a number of goods and services for your business. It might be a new product, it might be a new facility that you need to build or it may be a new payrol service provider that requires the uphaul of your technology and infrastructure.

That's a good start. You know what you need to deliver. 

From this point you then need to determine how you get to that point. You should not be on your own at this point. You should have a group of people working on this. You know, what most people would call stakeholders.

So you have a group of people working on this. Better yet, you have a team. 

The team needs to determine what good looks like at the start, what the new thing needs to do, look like, feel like etc. You get it. This now guides every decision.

Now, you need to initially look at what your existing Supply Chain can offer up. 


What you need to have done right before this is identify your requirements. The stuff you need to buy, outsource or bring in-house in order to deliver that all singing and dancing project outcome. 

You do need to document your requirements. 

It really depends on your budget, the complexity of your product and the infrastructure you have. Ideally, if you can docucment the requirements in some specific software, or some purchasing software than allows you to track requirements, then that is best.


You might only have the all-mighty powers of Excel at your disposal. That could work to

This is a step you cannot miss.

You just need to get your requirements on a page, you need to identify them and from this, you can then find Suppliers across the globe who can meet your requirements if you cannot fulfill the requirements in-house.

You will usually find that your Supply Chain is full of Suppliers you were not aware of or many that you no longer use. Some places call this Vendor Management. I'm not a fan of this terminology. 

So, once you have looked to your Supply Chain, rationalised it if you had time (you can always do a bit of work on this, put it on hold and tackle it once you have finshed this project), you can then identify the gaps that you have in your Supply Chain.

You can call this a Gap Analysis if you want.

You can make this as simple or as complex as you need to. Ideally, you look at the requirements you need to fulfill, you tick off the requirements that your Supply Chain can fulfill and you identify the requirements that your existing Supply Chain cannot fulfill.

From this, you go out. You go out and talk to suppliers. You research suppliers on google, LinkedIn and using any pre-existing data sets your Business may have. You talk to your colleagues, your staff and the people around you to find out if they know of any suppliers who can meet the requirements.

From here you can request informatuon from any number of Suppliers by asking them if

they can fulfill your requirements. You can then move on to get quotes, do some due-dilligence on the Supplier, meet the Suppliers, on-board the Suppliers as an approved Supplier to formally add them to your Supply Chain and keep working at it. 

Over time you will create a Supply Chain that will deliver to you thw requirements you need.

You can make some Suppliers preferred Suppliers, you can create long term agreements with fixed pricing over a set period of years, you can manage stock, invetory and services as you need them. You can do incredible things when you put the work in.

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