Like your business, your supply chain is a vast and complex network. Businesses need to source product from suppliers, who may also source materials and components from their own suppliers, and so on. If one part of this network faces a problem, it makes every part vulnerable. Having a deeper understanding of how supply chains work and how efficiently you can manage potential risks will help you resolve issues quickly. There are steps that you can take to cultivate resilience in your supply chain, which means you can better anticipate, react to, and recover from unexpected problems. If your goal as a business is to emerge stronger as the days go by, you can implement some of these steps to achieve supply chain resilience. Here are some tips to build a resilient supply chain, and how our supply chain services can help you.
Steps to Build a Resilient Supply Chain
Analyze the Risk
Analyzing the risk in your supply chain is your starting point. You need to understand what risks each of your suppliers brings to you, how significant these risks are, and how you can prevent them. By understanding the risks associated with each supplier, you can get proactive to protect your business against it. By analyzing the risk, you will gain an understanding of the maturity of your suppliers, and how capable they are of managing any issues that come up. Then, you can ensure that they have processes to mitigate their own risks as well.
Take the Long-Term View
As you build your supply chain, you should take your time and be proactive. A reactive solution that involves just-in-time procurement and managing cash flow raises the risk of your business facing challenges. It’s common for organizations to forget that incentives to save money can also bring serious risk because they focus on perceived short-term benefits instead of having a long-term view. By having a proactive solution, you can review potential threats and ensure that you are not spending too much for possible risks. From this larger perspective, you can create a better strategy for yourself and your suppliers.
Centralize Your Risk Monitoring
By centralizing your risk monitoring you will save time, resources, and confusion. There are many tools in the market that can help you monitor your supply chain and build a responsible one for various risks. The goal is to keep your data consistent within that framework. You will need to host your own facility data, supplier data, and third-party risk data in one place.
Be Targeted
After identifying the risks in your supply chain, you should develop mitigation strategies that are sensible and innovative. Sensible mitigation strategies simply mean you are choosing a strategy that caters to the specific risks in your supply chain. It should be a quick and effective solution that is appropriate and cost-effective. In terms of innovation, you should constantly be updating your strategy with your suppliers to find even better ways to reduce risk. There is no one size fits all solution, which is why you should be targeted in your approach.
Communicate What You’re Doing
Your consumers, partners, suppliers, and investors need to know that you are responsible to the environment and your communities. This requires effective communication of what steps you are taking to mitigate risks head on. Doing this will be good for your brand and create new opportunities to expand. A great tool to illustrate improvements in your performance is analytics.
Evolve Your Approach Through Lessons Learned
Despite being proactive, things may still go wrong. However, it’s how effectively you respond to these hiccups in your supply chain that will keep it operating well. Be sure to take note of any lessons learned about the risks that happened and how you responded to them, so that you can create a database of best practices. These learnings can be applied to your overall supply chain management strategy and can be taught to your employees to improve chances of future success.
Benefits of a Resilient Supply Chain
Availability
The first benefit of a resilient supply chain is availability. With quality operating systems, you can access real time inventory data and adapt to global constraints. This gives you and your suppliers peace of mind during unexpected weather-related events and catastrophes. Even if one location gets hit with a blackout, you can still access the latest information on your system elsewhere at the click of a button.
Flexibility and Configuration
Unexpected disasters do occur, and your business needs to be able to respond to these challenges. Using cloud-based software, you can be ready for anything with original configurations from any device, without needing to set up a new system. Resilient supply chain management also allows you to collaborate with your vendors to adjust the flow of products based on changes you make at your facilities or distribution points. This interconnectedness allows you to have full control of how you manage your inventory and respond to challenges.
More Control
Total control in your business means knowing and seeing exactly where your inventory is at anytime. By obtaining cloud-based software and working with a third-party logistics provider, you can have a single view of your inventory across your entire network. This visibility gives you more control over your business.
Contact Lean Supply Solutions for Low-Risk Supply Chain Management
With the right supply chain management, storms can come and go without affecting your business. With resilient cloud solutions, quality inventory management, and other beneficial supply chain services, you can prepare for future challenges and be ready with solutions that help you and your suppliers.
A third-party logistics supply chain provider can help you deal with the challenges of a growing business, whether you are a small- or medium-sized organization. With their supply chain services in your hands, you can benefit from their efficiency and talent, as well as many other advantages such as supply chain management software and technology that increase visibility and communication between you and everyone in your business network.
If you are looking for the right company to partner with, Lean Supply Solutions is the answer. We rise to the challenge of meeting our clients’ needs through our services which include product fulfillment, warehousing and distribution, e-commerce fulfillment, warehouse pick and pack, order fulfillment, and more. To learn more about outsourcing to our supply management in Toronto and Vancouver, or to ask any questions, contact us today.
