How to Avoid Supply Chain Bottlenecks!

Unchaining Change Leadership

It’s easy to visualize your supply chain as a river, flowing from one point to another. Along the way, it can branch out into various tributaries and meet various bottlenecks — but like running water, any item in the supply chain will find its way to its destination eventually.

Yet just as a dam can hold back the flow and slow it down, your processes can be encumbered by bottlenecks.

There are many reasons why a bottleneck may develop in your logistics, but the effects it can have are all negative. If left unaddressed, they can cause delays, hurt productivity and waste resources.

None of these is good for your business’s bottom line, which means it’s crucial to know what causes them and how to address them.

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Supply Chain and Procurement in the Digital Age!

If your supply chain is more visible, you can halt minor issues like order mistakes or project delays and react to problems more quickly. If you want to increase the efficiency, reliability, and robustness of your firm’s whole supply chain, having rapid and easy accessibility to that sort of knowledge is essential.

This is the future as Supply Chain and Procurement enter the Digital Age.

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Gainshare or Retain Share? Obstacles to Collaborative Cost Reduction!

When presented with cost savings opportunities by third parties, or by others within a company, too often those opportunities are turned down. Instead of sharing savings (gainshare) people would rather try to achieve the savings themselves.

Too often this myopic, “not invented here” mentality results in either the realization of little savings or, more likely, the failure to realize any savings at all.

Procurement teams must put their pride aside and understand that additional savings can accrue to them if they engage in gainshare partnerships instead of trying to horde all potential savings to themselves.

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“Amazon-ifying” Procurement and How it Can Reverberate Across Manufacturing!

Are you an Amazon addict? The sort of person who always has stacks of brown boxes piling up outside their door? If so, you are far from alone. As of 2023, 67% of all American households have an Amazon Prime subscription, and Amazon owns 38% of the e-commerce market in the US. 

It’s easy to see why the online marketplace is so popular. Simply by searching for a pair of shoes within an intuitive user interface, users are given a seemingly limitless amount of choices each with prices, photos, measurements, and any other metric a shopper could desire.

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Procurement Terminology is a Mess!

From one Procurement organization to the next, Procurement language and terminology differs.

Of course, it’s impossible to expect that every company would work within the exact same framework of understanding and messaging, but the lack of being able to communicate can sometimes be the difference between success and failure.

Procurement is a function, that is undergoing transformation; technologically and ideologically.

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Why is Supply Chain Such a Great Career Path?

When I started my career the term “Supply Chain” had just been coined. As such it was many years before I actually heard of the term “Supply Chain Management”.

Regardless I pursued my interests and took on an increasingly diverse set of progressive jobs as time went on. Now as I look back on my career virtually everything I did falls under the banner of Supply Chain management.

Given the phenomenal opportunities that Supply Chain offers for personal and professional growth it is a career path which I highly recommend to anyone.

What is it about Supply Chain that makes it such an appealing career path?

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Why Your Business Needs a Category Management Plan!

Businesses must be aware of several factors to remain competitive in today’s volatile market. A solid procurement strategy can help streamline and refine purchase decisions, ultimately improving the bottom line. A sound procurement strategy includes category management and a category management plan.

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Sourcing Priorities: Low Cost Geography or Domestic On-shoring?

For many years the predominant priority in sourcing has been finding the lowest cost possible. This paradigm has driven an incredible the movement of a tremendous amount of production to lowest cost regions such as Asia.

However the continuity of supply issues caused by the pandemic has created a call to repatriate much of this manufacturing into domestic, albeit higher cost, regions.

What is the appropriate sourcing strategy going forward?

Should you keep work in low cost geographies, establish sources in multiple geographies, or on-shore work into high cost domestic countries?

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What is Procurement’s Place in the Value Chain?

Where does Procurement stand in your organization’s Value Chain?

Hopefully, you’ll be able to formulate an answer to that question after reading this post.

I speak with Procurement, Sourcing and Purchasing professionals every day, from various globally functioning organizations, and there’s a resounding similarity in every one of those conversations…

Procurement is — still — largely viewed as a secondary activity in most organizations’ value chains.

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Blockchain Technology Reshaping SCM !

Growing global complexity in supply chain management has forced organizations to look towards technology as their silver bullet; serving as the missing link between people (supply chain actors) and the ability to collaborate at scale. As such we have Blockchain technology reshaping SCM.

Blockchain technology is one of the most hyped amongst the currently developing technologies, hypothesized to make one of the greatest impacts in supply chain management — especially procurement and logistics — in the coming years. If SCM tech were a summer reading list, Blockchain would be the Twilight trilogy.

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Total Cost of Ownership Procurement Model Failure – What’s Missing?

Many businesses use some form of Total Cost of Ownership model to support their Procurement and sourcing decisions. In fact these models are not just used casually, but they often are designed to inform and make optimal sourcing choices.

But many dynamics that we have experienced in the last few years suggest that these models are less than optimal. From chronic global Supply Chain breakdowns during the pandemic through to disruptions caused by outsourcing and single points of failure, sourcing decisions have been exposed as being less than ideal.

What is the current nature of these Total Cost of Ownership models, and what needs to change to make their use more robust and responsive?

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What is the Best Supplier Vetting Process?

Does your business rely on at least one supplier? Or do you need multiple suppliers in order to perform your daily operations? Either way the quality, reliability, and value for cost of your suppliers and supplier vetting is crucial to your organization’s success.

On the other side, if your suppliers don’t live up to the standards you require, your organization can be damaged. 

Suppliers can tarnish your reputation by causing you to deliver unsatisfactory products to your customers.  A supplier with internal problems can delay your orders, making you miss deadlines and break promises.  Late or low-quality products could cause you to lose major customers or be forced to process refunds.

It’s vital, then, to use a consistent Supplier Management system to vet excellent suppliers and secure the ones that will help your brand to stay strong.

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Imagining the Supply Chain of the Future!

Imagine what the future will look like in Supply Chain!

We don’t mean the near future, but the very distant future.  There are articles which describe what the future of Supply Chain will be like in 2025, or even 2030.

But is that enough of a far-reaching vision to offer much more than an incremental view of what we see today based on existing technology?

Any view of the near future is more likely to describe incremental changes and incremental advancements based on the current knowledge base.  But an extremely distant vision of the future is more likely to offer revolutionary ideas as to what future possibilities are.

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7 Reasons to Hire on Contract for Supply Chain!

Economists have done a lot of analysis on the rise of the so-called “gig economy.” More workers are using short-term contracts and other forms of hire on contract employment to provide additional income to supplement or replace permanent jobs – think Uber, DoorDash, etc.

But more and more companies in a variety of industries are also bringing on high-skilled contingent labour for white collar positions in a number of impactful business functions like Technology, Procurement and Supply Chain. 

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Our 2019 Top 10 List!

Here at Supply Chain Game Changer our fundamental mission has been to share experiences and expertise in the areas of Supply Chain, Logistics, Distribution, Procurement, Business, Human Resources and more. We now present our 2019 Top 10 list.

In our 3rd year at Supply Chain Game Changer we have had the tremendous opportunity to share more content created by ourselves and a growing number of Guest contributors.

With new articles provided to us every week our audience is allowing us to share ever more engaging content and their incredible intelligence for the benefit of all. We extend our thanks to all and invite everyone to submit articles for our consideration.

Here at the midpoint of 2019 we would like to share the 2019 Top 10 List of our most viewed articles of 2019!

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