The future of supply chain risk management

The COVID-crisis has prompted a period of introspection as organisations question how to best structure their supply chains and manage their risk

Trends towards global sourcing, mobile warehousing, just-in-time production and lean manufacturing have created supply chains that are highly optimised, but also increasingly complex. When things are going well, this means cost-effective operations, less waste and companies can react flexibly and in an agile way to customer demands.

However, these trends also expose the supply chain to new, sometimes hard to recognise risks. And when there is interruption, the complexity of these supplier systems and the immediate nature of production can mean businesses are suddenly facing significant disruption with immediate impact to bottom lines, or even market share and reputation.

For instance, when governments imposed lockdowns to curb the spread of coronavirus, many firms found that manufacturing ground to a halt as the transportation of goods was interrupted. Where once a business was likely to have spares and back-ups in warehouses, just-in-time practices mean that many businesses are now left without access to the services or parts they need to operate.

Shifting sands

The uniquely volatile business environment of the past year has brought to the forefront of the business agenda the supply chain vulnerabilities they face. For some, this could signal a change in practices in the future to increase supply chain resilience – whether that’s looking at near shoring and onshoring, reintroducing back-up stock in warehouses or installing alternative production sites.

Kocher said: “What’s changing is how risk managers, management and insurers alike recognise and factor supply chain risk into their decision-making. With more and more severe supply chain interruptions materialising, businesses have started to reconsider certain aspects, such as having suppliers nearby to eliminate certain risk factors from their business activities.”

The role of risk engineering

As organisations continue down the path of introspection and question how to best structure their supply chains and manage their risk, it becomes ever-more crucial that risk managers understand the full extent of the vulnerabilities in their own production process. Kocher believes that risk engineering plays an increasingly key role in this process.

“One of the key value drivers is to understand your supply chain and the assumptions you are making about it in case of disruption. This may sound trivial, but it is a fundamental condition to be in place before conducting impact assessment, quantification, deciding on the mitigation strategy and implementing mitigation measure. A structured approach to ensure adequate understanding in sufficient depth is critical. ”

Empowering better decisions

Often, when a company considers key or critical suppliers, it is examining its supply chain with a financial lens, or with a strong focus on individual business sections. A realistic company-wide, impact-oriented view, underpinned with decades of actual loss experience, supports the identification of key exposures which may otherwise go unnoticed.

Kocher concludes: “There is no one perfect way of managing supply chain risk. The risk engineer brings to the table a wealth of experience of what the process could look like, and is able to pick up the individual client where they stand in their supply chain risk management journey, with the goal of bringing them further towards a comprehensive supply chain risk management adapted to their specific needs.”

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The changing role of the CFO in a post-Covid-19 world

The changing role of the CFO in a post-Covid-19 world

The changing role of the CFO in a post-Covid-19 world

Pre-Covid-19, CFOs primarily focused on reporting historical financial performance. But today, with rising logistics costs, supply chain bottlenecks, escalating input costs, and the uncertainty of sales, developing a forward-looking perspective is a must, write Chee Wee Teo, Huan Gao and Adam Mokhtee from Alvarez & Marsal.

In the months and years ahead, the CFO role must significantly evolve to keep up with the ever-changing Covid-19 environment. To be successful in the role, CFOs need to apply predictive thinking, adopt a greater strategic view, and increase their focus on forward risk assessment and contingency planning.

Develop a forward-looking perspective

Traditionally, finance teams spent 80% of their time on reporting results and 20% of their time on forecasting. In a Covid and post-Covid world, that ratio needs to shift toward a forward-looking approach that will better prepare companies to respond to unexpected events.

With this new approach, the CFO’s conversations with the CEO and the board will center on what could happen in the future. For the CFO who is accustomed to relying on historical data, this may be an uncomfortable transition, but it’s vital for the changing role of the effective CFO.

Digitize the finance function

Although digitizing processes has always been necessary for efficiency, the digitization offorecasting has become especially crucial. Leveraging digitization for predictive analytics can help anticipate challenges ahead and allow companies to stress test their business plans.

In some companies, the CFO manages the finance team while the Chief Digital Officer leads the data analytics effort. We strongly encourage the finance function to collaborate with data analytics so that the CFO can develop a predictive, forward-looking view of where the business can go.

The following should be digitization focus areas:

Customer focus:

Build a profile of key customers, their cadence in ordering products, consumption pattern and liquidity situation.

Production and inventory management:

Establish a robust production system (that captures the right production costs) all the way through to an effective sales fulfillment (that delivers the right product to customers at the right time witminimal production waste and inventory leftover). These interdependent processes are typically filled with manual touchpoints and subject to human judgement. This can be significantly augmented with digital tools to drive optimization.

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Role of Business Intelligence in Supply Chain

Role of Business Intelligence in Supply Chain | Bold BI

Role of Business Intelligence in Supply Chain

Supply chain management plays a vital role in the emerging world market. According to the Harvard Business Review, in 2018, the U.S. supply chain made up 37 percent of all jobs, employing 44 million people in the U.S. To stay competitive in the supply chain management business, you need to recognize the potential weaknesses of your organization and form ideas to overcome them. Business intelligence (BI) helps you identify potential risks associated with your business and enables managers to take timely corrective action. BI gives you the required organization and visualization of the data stored in your business’s data banks needed for insight into its patterns. In this blog, I am going to discuss why supply chain management needs business intelligence and how BI paves the path to the growth of your business.

Why supply chain management needs BI

  1. BI helps key decision-makers monitor internal inefficiencies and gives them the metric-driven insight to take appropriate actions to overcome these inefficiencies.
  2. BI tools, such as scorecards and dashboards, provide detailed breakdowns of reports on your company’s performance with many available metrics and KPIs. These help you monitor the progress of your company growth, like whether quarterly goals are achieved or not, as well as forecast future results based on your previous performance data.
  3. Since supply chain management involves many departments, there is a lack of visibility and lots of data spread across the departments. BI collects all of your company’s data into a single platform.
  4. With the detailed and specific data from every step of production, you can go through the process from transporting raw materials to delivering your final products to customers and strategically enhance each part.

Various aspects of BI in supply chain management

The supply chain comprises various elements, such as operations management, logistics, procurement, and IT. It acts like the wheels of a vehicle. If anyone of them fails, the entire vehicle cannot move. BI coordinate each aspect with the others and helps you to run a more successful business.

  1. Demand and inventory management
  2. Distribution and communication management
  3. Supplier and vendor association
  4. Forecasting

Bold BI’s business intelligence dashboards for supply chain management

With Bold BI’s supply chain management dashboards, you can achieve the objectives of your company by tracking the important KPIs (such as cash-to-cycle time, perfect order rate, customer order cycle time, inventory turnover), drilling down into the key metrics with a detailed analysis in every widget, and identifying the risks in your process and mitigating those risks with action plans.

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How a Unified Logistics Approach Drives the Customer-Centric Supply Chain

How a Unified Logistics Approach Drives the Customer-Centric Supply Chain

How a Unified Logistics Approach Drives the Customer-Centric Supply Chain

No matter the hurdles of 2020, Logistics was up for the challenge. It kept production running and critical supplies flowing while adjusting to the shocks in demand and supply patterns and delivering essential goods.

The industry has already begun its transformation into a pull paradigm. To adjust to a new logistics footprint, operations are catering to smaller and more frequent shipments, while increasing its stronghold in eCommerce. With shippers and Logistics Service Providers (LSPs) attempting to increase their capabilities for market share gain, gone will be reactive bulk handing, serial execution, and long planning cycles.

Now it’s time for logistics to up its game — again.

How can it morph from inside-out, efficiency-focused to a model that’s outside-in and centered around the customer experience? We believe the future of logistics is unified logistics, where shippers and LSPs can seamlessly plan, optimize, and orchestrate across nodes and networks, resulting in consistently higher customer service levels and efficiencies.

Let’s discuss the aspects that make unified logistics a reality.

Boundaryless Orchestration

Existing logistics systems are usually configured with static, pre-setup actions, and often lack advanced visibility. Even if visibility exists, the functionality does not allow timely execution. Warehouse systems may not be able to consider transportation information and vice versa.

Upstream Supply Chain Knowledge

Traditionally, transportation systems lack order visibility and updated supply chain plan information. In the warehouse, traditional distribution and fulfillment operations rely on aggregate and longer-term forecasts to plan labor schedules. The inventory positions in warehouse systems are determined by historical patterns and longer-term forecasts, causing operations to be reactive.

Digital Ecosystem and Network

The historic approach to collaboration and point-to-point integration won’t create an easy path to real-time communications for carriers and LSPs. Now with access to the digital network, shippers can tap into carrier networks, take capacity into considerations for order promising, and select last-mile delivery providers. Before, the carrier selection process was highly manual and used static rates, and now shippers can perform Dynamic Price Discovery to view freight rate quotes from carrier marketplaces.

Unified Logistics, powered by our Luminate Logistics and Luminate Platform solutions, arms shippers and LSPs with the ability to seamlessly plan, optimize, and orchestrate supply chain execution. They can gain consumer confidence by truly delivering the right product, to the right place, at the right time — even if the lot size is small.

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How intelligent automation will impact and revitalise global supply chains

The idea of automation in manufacturing and the supply chain is nothing new – since the earliest days of the industrial revolution we have sought to automate tasks with machines, and lower the cost of manufacturing processes.

In countless cases, the application of machines, and more recently software, has meant improvements in the consistency of products, facilitated near 24/7/365 production and has meant staff can be focused on higher value tasks in their company.

Yet the use of technology in the industry may not be fully understood; a recent Capgemini survey showed that nearly half (48%) of UK office workers are optimistic about the impact automation technologies can have. However, while respondents to the survey had a general idea of the benefits that might accrue, they were less clear as to how these technologies could be applied to their specific area of work. And worryingly, only 20% said they felt their organisations were currently benefiting from automation – clearly the industry is missing a trick.

However, as utilisation stagnates for certain companies, the market is maturing. Automation is now reaching far beyond simple process software and mechanisation. Technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), cognitive computing, advanced robotics, Digital Fabrication and blockchain are becoming increasingly popular, bringing together the power of automation and analytics.

Yet other areas such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, which are proven enablers for new ways of optimizing the supply chain and manufacturing processes, are less understood. It’s agile, forward-thinking businesses that are able to utilise these technologies in a thoughtful way that will reap the benefits.

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One-Page Data Warehouse Development Steps

Data warehouse is the basis of Business Intelligence (BI). It not only provides the data storage of your production data but also provides the basis of the business intelligence you need. Almost all of the books today have very elaborated and detailed steps to develop a data warehouse. However, none of them is able to address the steps in a single page. Here, based on my experience in data warehouse and BI, I summarize these steps in a page. These steps give you a clear road map and a very easy plan to follow to develop your data warehouse.

Step 1. De-Normalization. Extract an area of your production data into a “staging” table containing all data you need for future reporting and analytics. This step includes the standard ETL (extraction, transformation, and loading) process.

Step 2. Normalization. Normalize the staging table into “dimension” and “fact” tables. The data in the staging table can be disposed after this step. The resulting “dimension” and “fact” tables would form the basis of the “star” schema in your data warehouse. These data would support your basic reporting and analytics.

Step 3. Aggregation. Aggregate the fact tables into advanced fact tables with statistics and summarized data for advanced reporting and analytics. The data in the basic fact table can then be purged, if they are older than a year.

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6 Steps To Supply Chain Risk Management Success

6 Steps To Supply Chain Risk Management Success

Lean production may traditionally be considered the linchpin that holds successful supply chain management together, but reducing your exposure to risks is becoming a key priority for maritime companies.

Our dependence on, and partnerships with suppliers, whether it be via outsourcing or mitigating stock opens up a whole world of exposure for marine businesses and their procurement teams. That’s why risk management is so crucial to the supply chain.

Navigating risks really is the key to management success. With the global expansion of supply chains comes ever more complicated business structures and so countless issues can arise causing disruption, delays and ultimately money going down the drain.

Both buyers and suppliers can be hit by a number of unavoidable problems. From natural disasters to terrorism or cyber attacks. Each problem can have big effects on both upstream and downstream partners.

So what can you do to mitigate risk?

The best way to reduce exposure is to make sure you and your company keep up to date with developments in the maritime sector. And to follow a few key steps…

1. Choose your suppliers carefully

Conduct audits of your suppliers on a regular basis and if necessary, inspections to make sure they are committed to risk management like you are.

2. Authenticate suppliers’ insurance cover

It’s worth remembering that a certificate of insurance is only evidence of the insurance cover as it was when it was written.

3. Clearly define contract scopes and draft contracts

Be careful when defining contract scopes and draft contracts.

4. Understand the extent of your exposure

How much risk are you and your business exposed to?

5. Put a plan in place

Identifying risks is the easy part, now you have to get an action plan in place.

6. Lower the threat of risk by purchasing the right cover

Making sure your policy covers your company’s specific exposure mix and risk tolerance is important.

Do you have any ideas to add regarding risk management in supply chain? Share your opinions in the comment box or send us a message for discussion.