August 15, 2019
7 Key Benefits to Digitalizing Your Supply Chain
Supply chain managers are heroes.
They work tirelessly to keep the river of materials and equipment flowing, often putting in long hours working with tools that aren’t made for their needs.
They put out fires wherever and whenever they crop up, calling on a vast skill set that includes organizational ability, number crunching, and diplomacy in order to keep the wheels of business turning.
But many often work harder than they need to, and often on the wrong tasks. Legacy systems keep them mired in paperwork or data imports, when they could be improving current processes or even looking ahead.
Most supply chain professionals want to digitalize, but even those at large enterprises are finding it difficult to make the leap. Should they be making it a priority? Yes – here are seven essential reasons why.
1. Finding Cost Savings
This major benefit will make the C-suite sit up and take notice.
It’s not unheard of for an enterprise to be sitting on millions or even billions of dollars in surplus inventory. If these items aren’t appropriate for redeployment, they should be slated for disposition and generation of free cash.
Digital asset records make this possible by ensuring you can find assets, understand their condition, and assess whether or not they are being used (or could be used).
Aside from investment recovery on unused assets themselves, you also reduce warehousing costs when you dispose of unneeded items.
With accurate digital records, you’ll also be ordering in volumes closer to what you actually need.
It all adds up to a potential reduction of 50% in supply chain costs, 20% reduction in procurement costs, and a 10% increase in revenue according to IndustryWeek.
2. Saving Your Valuable Time
Manual processes may still have an established workflow in many organizations, but that doesn’t mean they make optimal use of time. Digital records ensure that data is entered only once and from there is accessible by an entire team.
Once records are in the system, reporting becomes much easier as well. Analytics dashboards mean that managers don’t have to spend hours importing and formatting numbers from different sources in order to generate reports.
What will you do with all the new time on your hands? You’ll be analyzing your markets, doing forecasting, and maybe even leaving work on time!
3. Creating a Single Source of Truth and Eliminating Gotchas
Speaking of manual processes, have you ever had to run down the hall to reconcile records between gatekeepers using different processes, often involving multiple spreadsheets or even paper records?
How about ordering a piece of equipment or a part, only to find out you already have the item in stock? Assets may be usable but effectively lost because their records are not accessible.
Forensic audit nightmares can become a thing of the past when you have one system that’s used by multiple departments.
Eliminating these silos also helps reduce over-ordering (which means assets sit in the warehouse or on the loading dock).
4. Uncovering New Internal Process Insights
Imagine having all of the information you need in one system that allows you to get a high-level overview, and drill down to the details whenever needed. That’s when you can really learn what’s happening, and spot inefficiencies that could be improved.
A digitalized supply chain is leaner, more efficient, and makes it much easier to understand where problems lie and where energy to solve them should be directed.
5. Switching from Reactive to Proactive Mode
With a digital supply chain, managers find they can adapt more quickly as the business landscape shifts.
Over time the benefits become greater. Once you’ve acquired a dataset on things like supplier reliability, delivery times, and pricing fluctuations, you’ll be able to plan ahead.
Switching to a predictive capability allows you to manage risks more effectively, and even save on costs in the long run.
6. Laying the Groundwork for Smart Supply Chains
In the next few decades, IoT track and trace technology will transform not just manufacturing, but many sectors.
Smart technologies will provide information like material locations, production status updates, alerts for equipment malfunctions, and so much more. Industrial facilities of the future will likely have a strong machine learning component with algorithm-based decision making.
Digitalizing your supply chain now will help your business prepare to take advantage of new technologies more easily—before you get left behind.
***Wait till we get into 3D printing as part of your Requis experience (future blog post!)
7. Giving Supply Chain a Seat at the Table
Supply chain teams have long been thought of as a subset to operations – when in fact they are the central nervous system to the entire business. It is time to recognize how vital and strategic the supply chain organization is to the overall enterprise
When supply chain can prove itself a driver of positive change and financial efficiency, people at the top start paying more attention. That means more say in the decisions that affect the business as a whole.
Welcome to the Digital Future with a Human Touch
Making the leap to digital will give you all the efficiencies of automated processes, but you don’t have to abandon the human component that ensures timely response.
We know that even the largest enterprise thrives on relationships and trust. When a contact has come through for you time and time again, it’s worth something.
That’s why Requis is the supply chain management platform that retains the human touch. Our concierge team is available to help you with rapid sourcing, selling, and tasks that are too time intensive.
Find Out More About What Requis Can Do for Your Business >