What is the most common mistake organizations make in a supply chain redesign?

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Perhaps the most common mistake organizations make when they redesign their supply chains is not to take into consideration the company strategy. The key driver for a successful redesign is the overall strategy of the company. The strategy should describe how the company expects to grow. That includes what customers, products, market segments, and geographies the company will be targeting. In addition, the strategy should state how they intend to win. In other words, how would the company differentiate themselves? For example, they could compete in price, quality, customer service, distribution, product customization, product availability, portfolio variety, or in many other ways.

The answers to these questions may lead to very different supply chain designs. Unfortunately, many companies still see supply chain as a single cost line in the profit and loss statement (P&L). Therefore, it is not uncommon to see redesigns focusing only on cost, ignoring major opportunities to use supply chain as a competitive advantage, aligning it to the company strategy.

Supply chain should be treated as a strategic area of the egypt mobile numbers list company, capable of affecting not only the bottom line, but also the top line of the P&L.

How much should a redesign focus on the current technologies in planning?

There are 3 main flows that should be taken into consideration while redesigning a supply chain:

Material flow

Information flow

Financial flow

The information flow is where we have all the planning activities. It is essential to careful consider the information flow during any redesign, since it enables the material and financial flows. If planning is not aligned to the other flows, we may expect major impact on the supply chain including shortages and/or excess inventory.

New technologies are helping the information to flow faster along the entire supply chain allowing companies to react faster to shifts in demand and to better synchronize their processes across the supply chain. These new technologies are enabling more complex designs and trends such as the decomposition and horizontalization of the supply chain. In other words, they promote better collaboration across partners in order to add value and create innovation.