Coupa Software: four tips for reducing supply chain risk

Coupa Software: four tips for reducing supply chain risk

Coupa Software: four tips for reducing supply chain risk

The cloud platform for business spend management, Coupa Software, drives “Value as a Service” by helping customers to achieve significant cost savings.

As is the case with every supply chain, there is always risks that must be considered. These risks could be financial, cyber, legal or fraud and business leaders have a responsibility to consistently work to overcome these risks. Coupa has compiled four spend management decisions to help cut supply chain risk.

1. Automate compliance verification

In order to decrease risk in company’s supply chains, organisations must ensure is audit-ready and fully compliant. There’s an importance to ensure every vendor is compliant with relevant standards and observe the tolerance for risk. The process includes checking vendor credit ratings, financial liabilities, legal judgements as well as other details.

2. Utilise the insights of the business community

With some companies undergoing regular checks on its vendors to obtain credit reports from third-party sources, best-of-breed business service management (BSM) technology accelerates this. Based on a range of sources such as income statements, court documents and news articles, BSM algorithms quantifies financial, judicial and public sentiment health of each supplier.

3. Enable real-time visibility for spend-at-risk

Recognising and understand the risk that comes from each supplier is vital to ensuring information is married with the actual spend of the organisation. In the supply chain space, being proactive is key due to the pace of which the world moves. By operating with an agile approach, it allows businesses to adapt to situations that weren’t accounted for, such as trade sanctions, currency fluctuations and natural disasters.

4. Control in-flight transactions to mitigate risk

The importance of supply availability is key. Understanding and identifying these risks before they develop is vital to ensuring businesses protect guard against such threats. BSM processes should enable clear visibility of transactions that are linked with supplier risk.

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6 Ways Quality Can Strengthen Supply Chain Profitability

To thrive in today’s competitive global business environment, manufacturers must have a top-to-bottom quality-oriented approach that infuses innovative thinking into every part of the supply chain in order to deliver world-class performance through products, processes and people.

Some promising news, according to a recently published report by Forbes Insights and ASQ, is that senior executives and quality professionals see a direct connection between the success of their continuous improvement initiatives and the success of their organizations as a whole.

The Forbes Insights/ASQ research surveyed 1,869 executives and quality professionals from around the world and focused on the links between quality efforts and corporate performance, as well as the evolving business value of quality and its relationship to the supply chain. Thirty-six percent of enterprises surveyed said that they regard themselves as an established quality organization, while 39% reported that they are still developing their quality programs and 25% said they are struggling to implement quality in their companies.

For those organizations that do have established quality programs, more than half say their initiatives already encompass a range of key corporate functions, including operations and supply chain management.

This focus on quality for the supply chain is especially crucial when one recognizes that supply chain management is often motivated to achieve the least cost when identifying and qualifying new suppliers. Supply chain leaders are often rewarded for these cost-savings. But then extra costs are incurred once the final product is manufactured and delivered and it is discovered that reworks are required due to the focus on price and not quality.

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10 ways big data is revolutionising supply chain management

Big data is providing supplier networks with greater data accuracy, clarity, and insights, leading to more contextual intelligence shared across supply chains.

Forward-thinking manufacturers are orchestrating 80% or more of their supplier network activity outside their four walls, using big data and cloud-based technologies to get beyond the constraints of legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain management (SCM) systems. For manufacturers whose business models are based on rapid product lifecycles and speed, legacy ERP systems are a bottleneck. Designed for delivering order, shipment and transactional data, these systems aren’t capable of scaling to meet the challenges supply chains face today.

Choosing to compete on accuracy, speed and quality forces supplier networks to get to a level of contextual intelligence not possible with legacy ERP and SCM systems. While many companies today haven’t yet adopted big data into their supply chain operations, these ten factors taken together will be the catalyst that get many moving on their journey.

The ten ways big data is revolutionising supply chain management include:

  1. The scale, scope and depth of data supply chains are generating today is accelerating, providing ample data sets to drive contextual intelligence.
  2. Enabling more complex supplier networks that focus on knowledge sharing and collaboration as the value-add over just completing transactions.
  3. Big data and advanced analytics are being integrated into optimisation tools, demand forecasting, integrated business planning and supplier collaboration & risk analytics at a quickening pace.
  4. Big data and advanced analytics are being integrated into optimisation tools, demand forecasting, integrated business planning and supplier collaboration & risk analytics at a quickening pace.
  5. Using geoanalytics based on big data to merge and optimise delivery networks.
  6. Big data is having an impact on organizations’ reaction time to supply chain issues (41%), increased supply chain efficiency of 10% or greater (36%), and greater integration across the supply chain (36%).
  7. Embedding big data analytics in operations leads to a 4.25x improvement in order-to-cycle delivery times, and a 2.6x improvement in supply chain efficiency of 10% or greater.
  8. Greater contextual intelligence of how supply chain tactics, strategies and operations are influencing financial objectives.
  9. Traceability and recalls are by nature data-intensive, making big data’s contribution potentially significant.
  10. Increasing supplier quality from supplier audit to inbound inspection and final assembly with big data.

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External Insights Critical to Effective Supply Chain Performance

Traditional forecasting models that leverage historical data to predict future performance are the tools used by most supply chain executives to plan critical functions, yet these predictions are frequently inaccurate. In fact, research from KPMG International, in cooperation with the Economist Intelligence Unit, shows that most quarterly forecasts are off by 13 percent—meaning that supply chain managers are basing their decisions for ordering materials and scheduling distribution on erroneous projections. The result can mean surpluses or shortages, potentially costing companies millions either way.

There is a better way to anticipate supply chain demands—one that can vastly improve projections, and decrease the discrepancies between forecasting and reality, therefore helping supply chain executives perform their jobs more effectively. Few companies take into account macroeconomic factors, global manufacturing activity, consumer behavior, online traffic, weather data, etc. when making business projections. Yet companies that do identify leading performance indicators using such external data earn more than a 5 percent higher return on equity than those that use only internal metrics. Leveraging external factors, in addition to internal performance measures, is proven to result in more accurate, effective forecasts. Not to mention that improving forecast accuracy can represent huge bottom-line benefits. For a billion dollar manufacturing company, for example, improving forecast accuracy and overall return on equity even 1 percent can equal a $3 million increase in net income.

Forecasting accuracy, improved through external factors, benefits multiple business functions—from financial operations (shareholder value) to human resources (adequate staffing) to marketing (product innovation)—but is especially impactful on the supply chain management function.

Improves Inventory Management

Improved forecast accuracy using external drivers equates to reduced inventory management costs, ultimately improving bottom-line profit. By accounting for external factors, companies can see a 10 to 15 percent improvement in forecast accuracy, significantly decreasing the cost of excess inventory. By ordering raw materials based on correct projections, supply chain managers no longer have to worry about discounts necessary to move excess inventory or the cost of warehousing excess materials because they are ordering accurately from the start.

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Why Supply Chain Visibility Tools are a Good Investment

Global supply and demand networks introduce distance, cultural and time-zone challenges, creating a need for greater visibility. Moreover, businesses are under constant pressure to cut supply chain costs and improve cycle times while meeting customer expectations. Ongoing mergers and acquisitions create even more complexity as each new division finds itself operating in silos and unable to leverage economies across the organization.

According to a recent report by Lora Cecere, founder and CEO of Supply Chain Insights LLC, two of the top global supply chain business pains for companies are increasing regulations and compliance and decreased clarity on decision-making across global and regional teams. Other major pain points included the ability to effectively use data; product quality and supplier reliability; availability of skilled people to do the job; and risk management.

To manage the opportunities and risks requires three supply chain visibility capabilities: quick access to global supply chain information; proactive supply chain alerts and the ability to manage by exception; and efficient collaboration with global trading partners. This type of visibility is more than tracking and tracing on the transportation leg. It’s following a product concept and subsequent purchase or sales order from design to final delivery, with all the compliance and finance steps along the way.

With easy access to real-time information, a company can monitor performance across the commercialization and purchase order lifecycles, including sourcing, logistics and import and export operations. With this insight, a company can improve its understanding of the impacts of decisions across its supply chain and respond quicker to potential issues. Similarly, supply chain visibility tools can help identify key metrics and create alerts to manage safety stock levels and minimum/maximum inventory levels, for example.

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