By combining innovative technology with your skills and knowledge, your company could improve efficiency and product quality through technology partnerships and innovation strategies. It would be able to build on and enact the organization’s social LTO/corporate responsibility and become an exciting and innovative employer that attracts and develops leading teams and workforce.
Evolving your supply chain is easier than it initially appears. You just need the right solutions and trusted technology partners that are in love with your outcomes more than their technology.
Where do you go from here? Use the following steps as a guideline for creating—and unleashing—your inner supply chain mastermind:
Recognize where you are, plan where you want to be: Assessing an organization’s supply chain strengths and gaps can be hard to do objectively. Consider partnering with an experienced third-party solution provider to help you discover shortfalls in efficiency and areas of potential waste, as well as create short term goals and long-term targets worth striving for.
Create your internal team of collaborators, key stakeholders and agents of change: Being a hero can seem like lonely work at first, fighting inertia and naysayers along the way. Create momentum with an internal team of collaborators by demonstrating how better intelligence and actionable data across the organization builds on itself. This includes:
Engaging production teams to champion and partner technology solutions that reduce downtime, production losses and related waste. An efficient supply chain department needs data driven insights from external and internal partners.
Become the champion of sustainability for your organization. Partnering with manufacturing on reducing waste and inputs is as critical to hitting targets as creating ecosystem partners.
Recognize your power. For most of your suppliers, you are their path to success. Understand how they are managing their own activities and be the partner that helps them drive their own improvements in efficiency and waste abatement.
Prioritize the skills, tools and technologies needed to attain greatness: Once your roadmap has been laid out, engage your solution provider to implement the tools and co-create winning strategies. Even with investments in legacy solutions, are you really taking advantage of the most effective technologies? At the start, aim for fast wins. Early successes can cement a change-oriented mentality with key stakeholders, and the cost savings from process improvements from tools such as advanced predictive maintenance can fund future upgrades. Be prepared to make tough calls: Masterminds aren't afraid to pivot to a better solution, even at the risk of having to "end" a legacy solution that is deeply embedded.
Use your newfound powers to drive organizational—and industry—transformation: Supply chain management’s critical role in manufacturing success makes it a pivotal place from which to enact change. Along with improving manufacturing throughput and reducing waste, partnering with an advanced data-driven solution provider can help an organization build a better workforce, hit ESG goals and even extend best practices to value chain partners.
Masterminds aren’t afraid to pivot to a better solution, even at the risk of having to “end” a legacy solution that is deeply embedded.