The Biggest Supply Chain Pain Points Today

Supply Chain Planning provides forward looking, strategic and tactical planning with an outlook for the future.

Supply Chain Execution applications use the information generated by Supply Chain Planning tools to complete the physical production, storage and movement of raw materials, semi - finished components, subcontractor components and finished products.

What are Supply Chain Pain Points?

In today’s supply chain management process, businesses operations require more flexibility with innovative business solutions to scale up their operations which requires real time information and intelligence. Business also need to consolidate technologies in a heterogeneous landscape to lower the total cost of ownership and arrive at a sustainable cost structure.

Deviations in the supply chain process, the exceptions are not to be seen far enough in advance to correct the root cause in many supply chain planning process. There is also an inability to use current information to drive internal Sales and Operating Planning process, which results in failed order fulfillment.The end result of this is in higher costs like expedited freight. The lack of synchronization between the different stakeholders of the supply chain thus creates sub optimal infeasible plans.

Supply Chain partners in the extended supply chain have blind spots. A small deviations from plan at one end of the supply chain have large and costly effects up and down stream which is known as the bullwhip effect. Some entities in the supply chain don't have access to product whereabouts. There is also an absence of a consensus scorecard and performance mechanism for continuous improvement.

Supply-Chain-Pain-Points

Overall the Supply Chain paint points impact the information security, business continuity, collaboration, regulatory compliance there by increasing the total cost of ownership in organizations.

What are the Biggest Supply Chain Pain Points?

Supply Chain Pain Points Today

• Information Technology is not an enabler for the Supply Chain visibility, responsiveness.
• Always reactive management. The late notification of unplanned events drives reactive management of likely impacts.
• The uncertainty in demand leads to excess inventory and the uncertainty in supply leads to speculative ordering
• The lack of Planning into stock levels up and downstream leads to shortages followed by overcompensation and excesses.
• Increased levels of discounting or write-offs for slow-moving or obsolete inventory.
• Deployment issues in determining where, and what quantity of inventory to deploy in the network, across dimensions of time, geography and demographics.
• Out-of-stocks lead customer to substitute brands or make purchases from competitor.
• Lost productive time tending to low-value data collection and manipulation efforts
• There are numerous systems and solutions in every organizations supply chain and there is an inability to track and trace product across multiple enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, and customer relationship management applications internally in every organization. The same problem exist across partner ecosystem.
• Improvement barriers such as cost and internal process prevent organizations in using new technologies such as RFID and EM.
• Critical and vital information is not available when needed resulting in lost sales , out-of-stocks and unnecessary mark downs and reductions.
• There are too many disconnected systems creating business process and data silos.
• The requirement for robust platform and lack of key integration between Enterprise Planning System and Supply Chain Management system.
• Truly global supply chain with increasing need for high performing applications.
• Performance issues with large amounts of data with little business value.
• System Integration concerns with changing landscape, upgrade, migration and maintainability effort.
• Excessive time spent on non-value adding ‘technology management’ activities – overly reactive – need to be proactive.