A Six Step Guide to Launching a Supply Chain Strategy

SIX CRITICAL ELEMENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL SUPPLY CHAIN

To thrive in today’s transformative age, organisations should focus on creating a supply chain that operates as a holistic ecosystem. Supply chains that were once linear now take the form of a variety of connected partners.

Supply chain management software includes the coordination of the movement of goods and data from its starting point, through to the point of utilisation, as well as:

providing a more efficient flow of information
optimising supply chain management processes
automating repetitive tasks.

As a result, this provides increased trust in relationships between partners within the value chain, customer satisfaction and increased opportunities for revenue generation.

INNOVATION AND VALUE CREATION

INNOVATION AND VALUE CREATIONRead More

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGYRead More

SUPPLIER PORTALS - IT'S A MINEFIELD

SUPPLIER PORTALS - IT'S A MINEFIELDRead More

SUPPLIER PARTNERSHIP

SUPPLIER PARTNERSHIPRead More

UNLOCK THE VALUE OF DATA

UNLOCK THE VALUE OF DATARead More

COMPLIANCE AND RISK MANAGEMENT

COMPLIANCE AND RISK MANAGEMENTRead More

01.

INNOVATION & VALUE CREATION

The world is not getting any easier to transact effective business within. COVID-19 shone an extremely bright light on some of the challenges that seemed viable to navigate prior, but increasingly difficult to work around during and after.

It is fascinating, as we begin 2023, to reflect on these challenges over the last few years and assess how the leading organisations in the world have surmounted them, and, in some cases, exceeded expectations. Procurement, which previously focused primarily on cost control, is now looking towards innovation and value creation. This, in most cases, leads to a more strategic partnership with an organisation’s supply chain and more sophistication around operating models and digital technology.

Digital technology should not be seen as a replacement for in-person engagement and account management, but as a strategic deployment to enhance and supplement traditional methods. There is no need to choose between in-person, remote and digital self-service methods. We need to provide dynamism and agility, which can only be achieved with a hybrid solution set.

This is about:

driving commercial compliance
speed to market
data visibility
the ability to proactively respond to change “in the moment”, rather than reactively, one week later, when the opportunity has disappeared.

According to the Deloitte 2021 Global Chief Procurement Officer Survey, Chief Procurement Officers today need to:

“…exhibit a broad understanding of value, and deploy a wider, more sophisticated set of levers to unlock, measure and protect the value”.

02.

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY

What is increasingly clear is that to achieve a state of sophistication, there must be a much greater reliance on digital technologies. When organisations, whether large or small, look inward to their existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution stack for innovative delivery models, the conclusion most often realised is that:

investment in their business-critical systems of record is not agile enough to handle the analytical needs of the supply chain, whether descriptive, predictive, or prescriptive
investment in their business-critical systems of record is not able to be extended to suit the dynamism required
full-suite solutions often fall short.

Best-of-breed Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) tools offer a potential solution, yet the overlap in functionality with existing systems of record is great. The implementation and, most importantly, integration of such systems has significant overheads, often for limited gain.

The observations we have made with our clients over time are that existing ERP systems are still very much fit for their primary purpose of:

the internal management of enterprise processes
transactional engagement with third party customers, suppliers and partners

Best-of-breed portal technologies can supplement this tooling and provide an effective return on investment, with a few provisos. These are as follows:

The data connectivity and integration requirements from your existing systems of record must be achieved. Many of the vendors that provide supplier portal solutions promote ease of deployment, yet customer feedback paints a different picture.

These portal tools must utilise configured end-to-end integrated processes and solutions, and not fall into the trap of having to be fully customised to suit your specific needs. When analysing customer feedback from analysts such as G2 and Gartner Peer Insights, many portal technologies fall into this trap. The result is that organisations regret these purchase decisions, implementation and deployment are protracted and, in many cases, the organisation in question would have yielded better results with the development of an in-house solution from scratch.

They must prioritise data. Both internal and external data help make fact-based decisions, leveraging predictive analytics to find hidden opportunities and emerging risks. Many portal tools in this Supplier Experience category fall short and in most cases customer (and supplier) feedback highlight slow and inferior performance with dashboards and analytics, and a poor user experience.

When considering such tools, this is very much an area you should focus on in your discovery and assessment. No matter whether considering a fully featured supplier relationship management platform or a more straightforward portal technology, the scenario is identical. Data must be seamlessly connected and integrated into this technology, with negligible impact on source systems, and be configured to suit your requirements and the underlying system architecture

AN AFFORDABLE SUPPLIER PORTAL

Other tools have a supply chain specialism, but are low-code with drag-and-drop builders. These provide an emphasis on services engagements which are developed for your specific needs for enterprise clients. They tend to come at a remarkably high price, including:

initial cost
extremely lengthy development
deployment engagements.

The Supplier Experience portal provided by Coeus BI enables you to see, within 60 seconds:

Your promotional performance
Invoice analysis for reconciliation
Proactive stock availability
Demand planning data exports
Product performance comparisons

IN SUMMARY

Supplier Portal solutions can be categorised into add-on modules or niche tools.
Niche tools tend to be used for specification management, streamlining production processes, spend management, supplier onboarding, and eCommerce marketplace programmes.
Other tools have a supply chain specialism, providing an emphasis on services engagements and developed for your specific needs for enterprise clients but they are costly and take a lot of time to develop.

04.

SUPPLIER PARTNERSHIP

Most of the Supplier Portal solutions sold today are portals predicated on providing insights and analysis of the performance of your suppliers: “for you”. They tend not to be: “supplier first”.

Forward-thinking CPOs today are driving operational efficiencies, digital transformation, and innovation directly to the door of their supply chain. This includes a more active stakeholder engagement and relationship management model, predicated on ensuring their supply chain is a fully connected extension of their own business. In order to achieve this, a Supply Portal should be:

deployed for the supplier
to the supplier
primarily used by them (and this should be its primary purpose).

Case Study Feature

Wickes - Enabling suppliers to achieve 137% sales uplift week on week

Situation:
Wickes, an early adopter of the Coeus Supplier Experience Portal went live with their deployment just before the first wave of COVID-19.

Wickes is entering its third year of subscription, and continues to experience significant value across a large supply chain, deploying Coeus Supplier Experience to over 1500 end users as suppliers.

Results:

The best proof point to share is directly from a Wickes supplier, Akzo Nobel, who supply paint brands such as Dulux.

The Wickes portal provided:

analytics of daily sales analysis
split of sales by channel (online/store)
visibility of distribution and weight of sales

This become invaluable for their business, enabling them to:

forecast demand
spot trends happening in near real-time
rapidly respond to demand
gain a more accurate understanding of minimum purchase quantities (MPQs) required on a per-store basis.

HIGHLIGHTS

Uniquely, during the first wave of COVID-19, Akzo Nobel spotted trends in customer buying patterns so early in Wickes stores that production plans were changed on-the-fly.
The primary demands had switched from interior paint to garden fence paint, and production geared up to satisfy this requirement.
For a month, Wickes and Akzo Nobel capitalised on this customer behavioural shift, and Wickes was widely reported to be the only retail outlet that had not run out of fence paint and drove exceptional footfall through stores.
Given that the Coeus Supplier Experience Portal provides Akzo Nobel with more accurate forecasting, this enabled them to identify a 50 SKU “priority list” of products that factories could focus production on, whilst minimising lost sales.

"Wickes vision is to share SKU-level data on sales, stock and accounts with suppliers daily to create a collaborative culture with relationships built on trust and partnering for success.

This gives us a triple win. A win for Wickes, a win for our suppliers, and most importantly, a win for our customers by helping us streamline our stock giving us a new level of dynamism.

Coeus helped us pivot during Covid-19, to streamline our stock, allowing us to achieve a 50% target of online click-and-collect, fueled by our supply chain transparency.

We can now forecast our stock much more effectively, and when we see issues, we can act on this insight rapidly. Before Coeus SEP, we were taking a weekly report of stock, and could only execute actions on this reactively."

Sam Betts,
Commercial Systems Manager - Wickes

IN SUMMARY

Forward-thinking CPOs today are driving operational efficiencies, digital transformation, and innovation directly to the door of their supply chain.
A Supply Portal should be deployed for the supplier, to the supplier and primarily used by them (and this should be its primary purpose).
Wickes has seen invaluable results from utilising the Coeus Supplier Experience Portal, particularly in spotting and responding to trends in customer purchasing behaviours.

05.

UNLOCK THE VALUE IN DATA

One of the keys to a successful implementation is recognising that not every one of your suppliers is at the same level of maturity. Those that are more mature will already be using advanced forecasting and demand planning tools. Some will approach their data challenges with automated machine learning and data science in general, but others will not.

"One thing organisations will undoubtedly continue to develop throughout 2023 is increasing the visibility of their whole end-to-end supply chain..."

Mark Holmes - Senior Adviser for Global Supply Chain, InterSystems

In cases where the maturity levels are lower, portals with forecasting and demand planning capabilities built-in:

1. Drive a shift in supplier performance
2. Provide a more “driven by data” partnership between you and your supply chain.

In these scenarios, your performance is improved by extending your data analysis and insights directly into their business. This will support an agile and insights-driven approach to business with you.

Of the capabilities outlined, the following two should be emphasised:

1. Highlighting process-orientated practices: sourcing criteria that address supply risk, for example.
2. Driving operational efficiency: the act of connecting, leveraging, and providing supply chain performance data directly to your suppliers should not be seen as a “one-way street”. This should be top of mind for global Chief Procurement Officers.

Leading organisations are more able to confidently predict risk within their supply bases. The COVID-19 crisis brought into stark relief the need to better understand the end-to-end supplier network and to ensure that they have high visibility into their suppliers.

Early predictive warning of issues with the supply of goods is critical, but the challenge is far more nuanced than this. Examples beyond predictive stock-out scenarios or extended lead time impact should include:

understanding risk in the context of financial stability
brand damage
failing to meet new requirements
failing to meet records such as detailed supplier profiling
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance
Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) targets.

Effectively predict risk with a secure and seamless analytics portal

Coeus BI has ensured that compliance and risk management challenges are fully addressed in its Supplier Experience Portal through the provision of:

proactive stock availability
online channel performance
the ability to export data for demand planning
product performance comparisons

What’s more, this data can all be accessed within 60 seconds.

The COVID-19 crisis highlighted the need to better understand the end-to-end supplier network and risks that exist beyond direct suppliers. This will be a critical capability to achieve agility.

THE SIX CRITICAL ELEMENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL SUPPLY CHAIN - THE CONCLUSION

The best supplier portals offer two-way interaction and communication and operational processing that cater for the collection, collation, and comprehension of your total supply chain performance, reduce errors, and simplify the recording and analysis of such data.
Agile organisations must set up systems and processes to increase efficiency, unlock capacity and enable a scalable foundation at the same time as leveraging data to understand what is happening (descriptive), why it is happening (diagnostic) and what might happen next (predictive).
Your goal should be simply to make better decisions, make them faster, and become more assured as you realise these with measurable outcomes in the modern data-driven world.

A 6 Step Guide to Launching a Supply Chain Strategy

TABLE OF CONTENTS

SIX CRITICAL ELEMENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL SUPPLY CHAIN

TAKE A LOOK - COEUS SEP 3 MIN DEMO

INNOVATION & VALUE CREATION

DRIVE AGILITY AND DEVELOP EXCEPTIONAL SUPPLY CHAIN PERFORMANCE

IN SUMMARY

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY

DID YOU KNOW?

IN SUMMARY

SUPPLIER PORTALS - IT'S A MINEFIELD

AN AFFORDABLE SUPPLIER PORTAL

SCHEDULE A COEUS SEP DEMO

IN SUMMARY

SUPPLIER PARTNERSHIP

Wickes - Enabling suppliers to achieve 137% sales uplift week on week

HIGHLIGHTS

WANT TO SEE THE VALUE THAT WICKES HAS?

IN SUMMARY

UNLOCK THE VALUE IN DATA

HOW CAN YOU ACHIEVE THIS?

IN SUMMARY

COMPLIANCE AND RISK MANAGEMENT

SCHEDULE A COEUS SEP DEMO

IN SUMMARY

THE SIX CRITICAL ELEMENTS OF A SUCCESSFUL SUPPLY CHAIN - THE CONCLUSION

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

SCHEDULE A COEUS SEP DEMO