Arguably one of the most popular topics for companies today is supply chain digitization. It has become such a common phrase, especially as we navigate this pandemic, where businesses explore new risk management measures to protect them in the future. The problem is that this is not a well-defined term. The meaning of digitization can mean many things depending on the company and the person’s role at the company.
If you were to take a poll, you would get answers that varied from faster speed to market, optimization of vendor management, transparency of communication and product workflows, or distribution management. While these are all use cases that digitization can solve, they do not define digitization. There needs to be a clear cut definition and roadmap for companies to understand better the results they aim for through properly implemented software.
Supply chain digitization is the cornerstone to getting all of our goals met as executives put together their supply chain strategies. Digitization is the process of breaking down silos to create a completely integrated ecosystem that is fully transparent and accessible to all the players involved. This access includes everyone from internal stakeholders to suppliers, vendors, designers, manufacturers, distributors, and customers.
When a supply chain is entirely digitized, it allows companies to adjust their operations based on real-time data. Businesses can marry data from product development, sourcing and production, and sales data to optimize current processes and improve forecasting based on customer-data and lead times. Ultimately, this will allow a business to maximize ROI on their best sellers’ production and cut their losses on their less popular products. Ultimately, digitization removes manual barriers like searching through spreadsheets, emails, and texts, to create a scalable, streamlined, and data-driven process for all supply chain participants, regardless of their skill set, geographic location, or background.
As a company increases its digitization level, it will start to see an immediate turnaround in cash flow and cost management. As turnaround times improve and employees no longer waste time on redundant tasks, the overhead will decrease and improve net margins across products. Ultimately one of the critical outcomes of digitization is improved cash flow and cost management. Especially moving past the COVID-19 pandemic, this is crucial to the financial health of a company.
Our system, the Suuchi GRID, is a user friendly, configurable cloud-based system that serves as the leading supply chain management software for companies across industries. The GRID empowers users by allowing collaboration across all participants with full visibility and transparency into your workflows through a single platform. Businesses can manage their entire supply chain from material and design management to real-time tracking of production and distribution to run real-time reporting to make data-backed decisions for future orders. The GRID also offers open APIs to integrate with any current systems to create a single source-of-truth to ensure end-to-end data integrity.
Now that businesses have the tools to define what digitization means to them and the solutions available, the question is when they will take action to preserve the longevity of their business.
