Supply Chain Management

What is the most effective Supply Chain Management strategy?

BCP Builder features in the below article on Supply Chain Management strategies.

I took a Business Continuity Perspective based on my learning’s from Yossi Sheffi’s book The Power of Resilience and my knowledge of Business Continuity.

This is a summary of the advice I offered in the below article:

Find the best supplier for your product or service, then before your hire them, check their Business Continuity Plan. Ensure they can continue to serve you through a disruption.

Once you’ve chosen the best supplier for any particular product or service, offer them 80% of the work. Give the remaining 20% of the work to your second choice supplier. Keep the details of your third choice supplier as a back-up.

If you follow this process, and one of your suppliers fails (for any reason) you will be able to fall back on your alternative supplier that you already have an existing working relationship with.

The most dangerous strategy you can use is to have a single source supplier. This means that although there are many suppliers you can choose from, you choose to get all of your supplies (for a particular product or service) from a single source. You should always have a working back-up plan.

Supply Chain Management Strategies – Summary

1. Business Continuity
2. Preventing unauthorized sellers and MAP pricing violators
3. Focus on your employees
4. Stick to your core strengths and outsource other tasks
5. Evaluate your suppliers
6. Cut inventory costs
7. Integrate business process with technology
8. Use inventory management software
9. Manage inventory risk
10. Take green initiatives and embed sustainability
11. Don’t forget your financial supply chain
12. Data based decisions
13. Take a hard-line against bribes
14. Continuously meet demand through prediction tools
15. Address the risk of data and cyber security
16. Ensure you have a truly integrated supply chain and own the data process
17. Design ahead to minimize touch points
18. Ask “What if…” questions
19. Develop a progression plan
20. Incorporate Risk Management
21. Hire great people and train them
22. Connect it to your business strategy
23. Build relationships with your suppliers
24. Automation

If you want to increase your Organizational Resilience, start with preparing a Business Continuity Plan and check out BCP Builder’s Business Continuity Planning Templates.