Introduction:
The smarter supply chain of the Future deals with the creation of a smarter supply chain to deal effectively with risks, challenges and meet business objectives. As supply chains have become more interwind and global, it becomes the today’s business demand to have a reliable, robust, sustainable and secure supply chain in the presence of latest technology solutions for instrumentation, interconnection, and intelligence. This paper will enable us to think about the challenges being faced by the supply chain executives and strategies being adopted by them to make supply chain not only efficient and demand-driven but also smarter, thus it has an important relevance to our course of study.
Summary:
In the first part of The smarter supply chain of the Future, the author elaborates in detail the challenges being faced by supply chain management executives. The 2nd part of the paper presents the solutions to make the smarter supply chain of future that is a strategic thinker.
One of the top five challenges that the supply chain executive is facing is the cost-reduction & efficiency as it is much harder to for the supply chain to keep pace with the cost volatility. The shifts in cost such as rising prices of commodities, the surge in oil prices, labor-cost, rising cost of financing are so fast that the traditional strategies of supply chain can’t work.
The second top challenge is the visibility in supply chain operations. It means consistent collaboration among the supply chain partners. It is also evident that best supply chain operations are becoming more collaborative to be more visible.
Risk management is another big concern of supply chain executive however they are divided on approach. The major stumbling blocks preventing companies from effective risk management are the lack of standardized processes, insufficient data, and inadequate technologies.
The ever-increasing rise in customer demands and inquiries makes it a big challenge for supply chain executives and demands to combine supply chain and customer relationship management to have a commercial-customer driven supply chain. Globalization has the top supply chain challenge with growing interdependence among companies. Global sourcing, unreliable distributions and longer lead time are some of the problems of it.
With the convergence of digital and physical infrastructure, the reliability of sensor technologies and product-tracking technologies, it is easier to adopt such strategies that can make conventional supply chain a smarter and strategic one.
The smarter supply chain is one that is instrumented interconnected and intelligent enough to help executive to make instant decisions.
They are thought to be more flexible and more visible with the help of intelligent modeling and real-time execution to help the executive to manage risks by forming contingency plans.
Conclusion:
The smarter supply chain of the Future provides an in-depth insight of the big challenges in supply chain management and their solution through the creation of the smarter supply chain that can help the supply chain executive to think strategically and intelligently.
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