Satisfying customers and winning their loyalty is the foundation that every successful retail business is built upon. Delivering a consistently excellent experience builds a level of customer intimacy that will set your business apart from the competition.
The digital supply chain landscape is shifting. Customer expectations have soared in recent years and the new services, parties, and software you’ve brought on board to service these heightened expectations has also introduced a new level of supply chain complexity. There's a great deal of pressure on today’s supply chain leaders to maintain operational excellence, integrate disruptive new technologies, and innovate for a superior customer experience. Achieving such lofty goals require a new approach. Enter Multi-Enterprise Order Management and Supply Chain Orchestration (SCO).
Martin Says... |
 |
| Every order gets its own execution flow, selecting the required services, most capable parties, and lowest costs. |
 |
What do you say? |
 |
| Click here to send us your comments |
|
|
|
The Customer Intimacy/Supply Chain Efficiency Balance
There was a time when supply chains could settle for trade-offs: cost or speed, service or quality, flexibility or reliability. Those days are long gone, and that equation has shifted from an imbalanced ‘OR' to an equilibrium of ‘AND'.
Crafting an optimal customer experience that not only meets, but ideally exceeds expectations, is difficult when there are so many moving parts and players involved. Consistency and reliability are fundamental requirements for a customer-centric system. However, companies must remain agile, so they can adapt to variations in demand, changes in the market, and supply volatility. None of this is possible without real-time visibility and control.
Establishing Visibility
Supply Chain Orchestration (SCO) can help bridge the gaps between all of the internal processes and external parties you work with. It can bind your systems, suppliers, and service providers together and bring new clarity and understanding. You need that real-time oversight of the entire life cycle before you can find the optimal workflow for any customer. Establishing that real-time visibility is the pre-requisite for creating a better customer experience, because it empowers you to integrate the flow across multiple activities, services, and business units.
From Visibility to Control
Once you have established end-to-end visibility, you can start controlling your supply chain to meet customer demand, and then to measure performance against expectations. SCO highlights problems immediately and offers the ability to build in automated re-routing rules, so you’ll never let your customers down. Over time, the data you're collecting about your supply chain can serve as the basis for process optimization and predictive analytics. Having an accurate cost-to-serve analysis makes it easier to align your efforts within the organization and fulfil customer needs.
Find out where the weak spots are in your organization. Learn which suppliers and services are working well and which aren't. When you want to expand into a new market, or offer a new delivery service, SCO can help you to establish the big picture view, configure the required flows and understand the risks, costs, and benefits involved. There's no need to take a leap of faith when you can see the cold hard facts. These kinds of actionable insights enable your supply chain to evolve, grow, and improve.
Customer Chain Control
Many organizations still run their supply chains from a simpler, static perspective. They likely still rely mostly on their internal-facing ERP system(s) to handle commercial orders, production, inventory, and finances. They may employ a Warehouse Management System (WMS) to deal with receiving, storage, and packing. And they may rely on a Transport Management System (TMS) to execute orders and move products around. That’s a very traditional supply chain and logistics technology stack, but it’s one in which each is sub-optimizing its own process silo, not creating the best of breed performance across all of your supply chain parties for an outstanding customer experience at the lowest cost.
To thrive and succeed in today’s hyper-competitive market, your customer experience must be the driving force. Every customer order gets its own micro supply chain, optimized for the best service level and the lowest cost. Each customer order gets dynamically sourced from inventory that could be in stores, warehouses, or with suppliers. And finally, every order gets its own execution flow, selecting the required services, most capable parties, and lowest costs. This continuous optimization or ‘Customer Chain Control’ as we at MP Objects are apt to call it, requires a smart, agile cloud platform for multi-enterprise order management.
About MP Objects
With offices in Rotterdam, Boston, Hyderabad, and Tokyo, MP Objects (MPO) helps some of the world’s largest brand owners and logistics service providers to optimize their orders end-to-end across their global supply chains. The MPO multi-enterprise cloud platform for Supply Chain Orchestration unifies information, processes and services across siloed ERP, WMS, and TMS systems, helping to master perfect orders in inbound, outbound and reverse flows, and enabling visibility, collaboration, and optimization across all of the internal and external parties in your supply chain. For more information, please visit www.mp-objects.com.
Any reaction to this Expert Insight column? Send below.
Your Comments/Feedback
|
