Contributor: Vishnusurya Pinnamaraju, Senior Supply Chain Management Consultant
For large manufacturers and distributors, gaining a comprehensive understanding of everything that’s happening in your Supply Chain – individual components; sub-assemblies; and final products, in all their requisite stages of production and travel between supplier; your organisation; and your clients can be an incredibly daunting task. By using the right technology, you can bring visibility to your supply chain and ease these critical challenges.
WHAT IS SUPPLY CHAIN VISIBILTY?
Supply Chain Visibility is the ability to track the material available across the entire business. Whether that’s in your inventory, the manufacturing process, in transit from your suppliers, or products that are due to be sent to the Customer. Through Supply Chain Visibility, you gain an overall visibility of Supply/Demand in the organisation, which enables you to give your clients a much clearer view of order tracking, pipeline delays for highly configured products, overall consumption data, maintenance, and more. It’s the cornerstone of healthy supply chain operations in the industry, and when connected with front-end technology like eCommerce or CPQ, it can greatly improve Customer Experience (for more on how Supply Chain supports the Customer Experience, read my last blog!)
HOW CAN SUPPLY CHAIN VISIBILITY HELP ME?
When Supply Chain Visibility is done right, it can enable you to have:
- Full visibility of available materials: With proper visibility of your supply chain, planners can know exactly how much of a given material to request for a specific order, ensuring there are no excesses of material in specific areas or shortages for other orders.
- On-Time Shipments: Having a comprehensive overview of your supply chain enables sales teams to forecast accurate shipping dates, and in turn can ensure customers’ delivery dates are honoured.
- Readiness for disruptions: Supply Chain disruption is commonplace to a greater or lesser extent, and big disruption events like the Pandemic exposed the dangers that larger scale disruptions can pose to the supply chain. With proper Supply Chain Visibility businesses can be prepared for and overcome such disruptions.
- Cost Savings: With proper planning, organisations can forecast the material exactly as per the requirement which can save warehouse space, manufacturing costs, and excess procurement related expenses.
- Accurate reporting: Reports are the key to track and holistically view your supply chain situation. With good Supply Chain Visibility, teams can generate accurate reports which will give a more precise view of your supply chain status.
WHAT’S THE SOLUTION?
In my years’ of experience, I know first hand the only real way to gain true Supply Chain Visibility is through an all-in-one application that can integrate with front-and-back office processes, and my recommendation is Oracle SCM Cloud.
Oracle SCM Cloud is a fully integrated Supply Chain Management solution which covers the end-to-end supply chain business, starting from new product design through to shipment to the customer, including planning, manufacturing, and purchasing. The solution is recognized as the leader in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Warehouse Management Systems and Transportation Management Systems.
BENEFITS OF ORACLE SCM:
All-in-one: Oracle Cloud has all the modules required to effectively manage your supply chain operations and gain true visibility, with tight integration. This is critical as it means all the required reports can be generated from a single ERP system with one integrated database for all business processes, and there is no need to implement any other ERP system or integrations.
Enhanced tracking and visibility: Oracle SCM Cloud covers all of the day-to-day processes of an effective supply chain, so businesses can eliminate manual processes and instead track all of the processes in one ERP platform, which will give greater visibility and tracking. Eliminating manual tasks also saves huge amounts of time that can be put to better use elsewhere.
Flexible reporting: In a more traditional ERP setup, users are often dependent on the IT/Analysis team to report on the health of the supply chain, which can lead to long lead times for simple reports. Oracle SCM Cloud enables users to simply develop the reports themselves with no lead time.
Latest technology: Stay up to date with latest features and technologies with continuous quarterly upgrades of the system and with the support of Artificial intelligence, Machine learning and IOT.
Great Customer Service: Oracle SCM Cloud works as a central hub for all of your customer’s information as all the modules are integrated with one another. With this central hub, users from different departments can work collaboratively on customer requirements and improve order delivery and accuracy. With this, sales team can focus on building the customer relationship instead of manual tracking or reporting of customer needs.
By investing in Supply Chain Visibility, businesses can build a 360-degree view of their supply chain that benefits both the organisation and your customers, simultaneously improving operational efficiency and customer experiences. To find out more reach out to me directly on LinkedIn, or get in touch with our team: [email protected]