4 tips for improving the flexibility of your supply chains:
Data Management
Large manufacturing companies or retail networks are complex systems consisting of multiple legal entities with distributed functions and wide geographical coverage. The data required for daily business operations is often scattered across different IT systems, files, and employees, lacking a central point of aggregation and standardized quality. This leads to significant manual effort in data consolidation, cleansing, and analytics preparation, as well as numerous human errors. The major time losses occur at the interfaces between departments/companies within the group and when working with external partners, as well as when solving cross-functional tasks that require a top-down view of the entire business or a substantial part of it, such as planning, performance analysis, and strategy.
To address these issues, a unified IT system is needed for the entire company, ensuring the collection, storage, and quality of all key data groups with the ability to distribute them to all internal consumers. Such systems fall into the categories of Master Data Management (MDM) and Data Hubs. In the absence of MDM, the integration of other systems can be pursued, but this approach will require ongoing financial investments and make your business's flexibility dependent on the speed of integration enhancements and the quality of individual system designs.
Meta-Business Perspective
In the past month, two of the world's largest corporations, Facebook and Microsoft, announced their focus on metaverses. There may be different opinions about these news, but the meta approach goes beyond one's own business and involves perceiving it as a complex set of interconnections with suppliers, retail networks, distributors, and customers. It allows for assessing the resilience and planning the development of the entire chain of counterparts, not just one's own business.
The first step toward flexible supply chains is building IT systems capable of serving all chain participants by transmitting data and automating the necessary business processes for interaction between them. These processes primarily include planning, orders, logistics, listing, price coordination, supply conditions, and marketing campaigns. From a meta perspective, such a system should be developed not within a specific company but as a joint IT solution for shared use or provided to all chain participants by an external provider because only this approach can account for the needs of all participants. One example of a solution built on this principle is the Animotech platform. The platform operates as a constructor where each client chooses what they need: Animotech Core ensures the structuring and quality of clients' data. Animotech PIM and DAM allow managing data about products, including media assets necessary for their promotion, as well as online transmission of selected data to both clients' internal systems and their counterparts and, if necessary, government organizations (e.g., for product labeling and certification). Animotech API provides ready-made methods for instant integration with clients' IT systems and the ability to work with already "cleansed" data within their own interfaces. A set of Animotech family applications serves for automating business processes within supply chains, replacing traditional EDI, OMS, SCM, CMS, and other individual systems.
Continuous Feedback Loops from Counterparts and Consumers
Implementing the described IT solutions serves as the foundation for the next crucial step: continuous monitoring of performance indicators of all participants and mutual adaptation of their businesses based on the collected data. The meta approach makes the business highly flexible and helps make optimal decisions based on today's data, ranging from minimizing inventory to producing customized orders on-demand, from incorporating new participants into the chains to implementing new production technologies. All these labor-intensive transformations can occur within a matter of days or hours since the entire infrastructure and data are already prepared.
Ecological Thinking
Ecological thinking involves changing the value models of companies towards long-term sustainability and caring for the well-being of all chain participants.
