Overcoming Barriers to Supply Chain Integration
When it comes to supply chain integration, most businesses have a common goal in mind. They want fully integrated, visible and adaptable supply chains that not only fulfill their needs but also give them the confidence that they can repeatedly meet and exceed customer expectations.
The reality? Many companies don’t recognize the barriers that hold them back from achieving an integrated supply chain. Or they may be aware of the barriers but unsure how to mitigate them.
Our team has helped many organizations identify these obstacles and overcome them to create highly successful supply chains. These are the four most common challenges we see and the solutions we provide to help our clients:
Example: Imagine you need to set up a new spare part in the system with the right parameter settings and configuration for warehouses and plants. You start an email chain for this process that includes your IT team, service team, planning team and approvers. That email goes back and forth multiple times across teams until you have everything you need. Within a supply chain, there are often many processes just like this that drag down overall efficiency.
Solution: At Corbus, we work closely with our clients to understand their process and their biggest pain points. We use our business transformation mindset to identify ineffective processes and find the right solution via process re-engineering and technology solutions. As part of that, we often find that many communications can be automated through robotic process automation or other tools. This type of transformation gives our clients a more reliable, repeatable process, which frees them to focus on more value-add aspects of their business.
Example: Let’s say you are a customer account manager (CAM). Your customer repeatedly asks about their order status from the time they placed the order until the time it gets shipped. As a CAM, you send emails, engage on chat, make phone calls to different people in the supply chain and spend a significant amount of time managing customer expectations.
Solution: At Corbus, we use our digital transformation tools to create visibility of material and demand in the supply chain. Reducing manual touchpoints not only improves internal efficiencies, but it also provides customers with up-to-date information more quickly. This level of visibility improves the customer experience and increases their confidence in your business. Customers can trust that you will supply what they need and know when to expect fulfillment.
Example: As a sales and operations planning executive, you follow up every week with your planners and operations team to get revised numbers to report to your leadership. You have to gather information from many people as well as multiple data sources, including Excel files, your sales system, enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, warehouses and more.
Solution: At Corbus, we use our business transformation mindset to identify siloed processes and develop seamless integration processes with the right technology. We work to uncover and eliminate inefficiencies, including those within non-core processes, to make a positive impact on the overall business operations. Through cross-functional process mapping, we define the scope of problems we are solving and look at the correlation between different teams and how they work together. We then develop technology solutions that work with the technology the company already uses, helping to drive down costs while increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the supply chain.
Example: Your ERP upgrade or replacement has been in the works for years. For now, you are stuck using inefficient and ineffective processes, and you still have years before you’ll see the benefits of the upgrade or replacement.
Solution: We understand that a complex, multi-year transformation journey can feel really daunting. It requires a lot of change and takes a lot of time, so we use our expertise and experience to make that process as smooth as possible. At Corbus, we can provide interim solutions that help alleviate the inefficiencies and ineffectiveness of your current processes while we work to implement long-term integration solutions.
These four barriers have plagued organizations throughout our modern history. But as we have seen with our clients, it doesn’t have to be this way. The good news is there are tangible, practical and innovative solutions that can help organizations better manage or even eliminate these issues within their supply chain.
Take the next step
At Corbus, we are transformation consultants. We have decades of experience partnering with Fortune 500 companies to understand their supply chain integration barriers and develop custom solutions that align with their goals and strategies.
Our approach includes a comprehensive current state assessment and analysis of the client’s integration barriers. We then build a user-friendly navigation platform, re-engineer the process and provide our clients with a robust digital solution. We incorporate VPN connectivity and data security to enhance the performance of mobile and desktop applications with real-time data.
With an optimized, integrated supply chain, our clients gain incredible efficiencies and the confidence that they can provide customers with what they need when they need it.
Ready to overcome barriers in your supply chain integration? Contact Corbus today to learn more.