Harnessing the Power of Technology for Better Supply Chain for Brands

New technologies present new opportunities for brands and retailers to achieve unprecedented value and competitive advantage in an expanding industry space.

From a business standpoint, brands and retailers will need to empower people across their organization to make decisions rapidly, accurately, and with confidence. The only way to achieve this is to harness digital tools that can help standardize processes, improve collaboration, and enable automation and process optimization.

In this post, we’ll dive deep into some of the main challenges that brands and retailers typically deal with and present actionable solutions that can contribute to better business results and increased profitability.

The problems

1. Lack of Visibility on Production Changes

One of the most significant challenges that brands and retailers might face is a lack of visibility over production changes. Disruption in the production can cause major problems like shipment delays and empty shelves. Not only can this disrupt orders and make business operations more difficult, but it can also create a poor reputation for a company.

Moreover, this lack of visibility can have a huge economic impact on retailers. A late shipment could result in a loss of revenue and extra costs like covering air freight rates in order to meet in-store demand.

Siloed communication and a lack of visibility over production changes make it difficult for retailers to prevent this from happening.

2. Disrupting the Supply Chain Operations Poses a Significant Risk to Success

More so than lack of visibility on production changes, a disruption in supply chain operations can cause a significant amount of backup, miscommunication, and a lack of organization. When managing several vendors worldwide, brands need to have a better organization like a company or risk the challenges of mitigating conflicts that could have been easily avoided with proper communication methods. Unfortunately, without a streamlined system, managing disruptions efficiently and minimizing their impact is almost impossible.

Working on different spreadsheets, emails and projects separately with each vendor makes it difficult for retailers to have full visibility over upcoming changes and to take the necessary steps to prevent higher risks.

3. Risks of Missing Historical and Pertinent Data

Most importantly, historical data and pertinent information regarding supply chain turnover, inventory management, and other statistics can provide areas of analysis. However, there is no potential to prepare and plan for the future appropriately when missing this information. With historical data loss, companies spend time and energy, often setting their plans back several weeks if not months, especially if they were attempting to revolutionize their system and create a more streamlined process of communication and operations.

Not having historical data on the performance of vendors makes it difficult for brands and retailers to choose vendors based on their performance and the risks

The Solution: Adopting technology that empowers your organization

In order to overcome the risks associated with supply chain management for brands and retailers, there are many ways to create a robust foundational support system or even find a software system that can support the tracking needed to ensure these capabilities. Mitigating these risks comes with oversight and high-quality data analysis, and there are many benefits to adopting Inspectorio Tracking into business operations management as the primary software for operations management.

Achieve Full Visibility and Oversight of Operations for Continuous Improvement

By understanding and seeing real-time data, brands and retailers can encourage improvements to the supply chain and understand the gaps needed to fix to achieve a genuinely streamlined and efficient operational system. Tracking provides brands and retailers with the tools to identify the root causes of delays in production, allowing them to prepare better for potential issues and to drive continuous improvements in their operations.

Having access to accurate data on the production chain empowers brands and retailers to drive and measure continuous improvement programs that can help reduce the costs of late shipments in the short term. Amongst the types of reports that can quickly be created are open orders, on-time shipment, late shipment, etc. Being able to access this information allows for increased transparency and enhanced collaboration.

With Tracking, it is also possible to enable notifications to receive timely updates on production changes to efficiently manage cancelation liabilities and timing deviations.

Create Streamlined Communications with Stakeholders and Suppliers

When working with multiple vendors, it is complicated to manage information flowing on multiple threads and excel files. Apart from that, there might be multiple teams involved in conversations about the same Purchase Orders that communicate in Silos to gather specific information.

In order to avoid any miscommunications, using Inspectorio Tracking will allow for effective communication with the stakeholders and suppliers to create efficient systems that produce an adequate operations timeline. Tracking allows to centralize communication in one single platform to ensure that everyone stays informed of the latest updates.

In addition to that, all the stakeholders involved in one same project can access the information shared by other stakeholder which ensures transparency and helps improve supplier relationships.

Use and Analyze Historical Data to Prepare for the Future

Using historical data and other metrics captured Tracking, companies can take advantage of the opportunity to prepare, increase accountability, and create detailed activity logs to access all of the firm’s needs.

One of the biggest advantages of implementing a solution that can help centralize historical data is the reduction in the amount of time invested in collecting data from multiple sources, gathering information for specific reports and ensuring that the data is accurate and up to date.

Therefore, Tracking helps retailers ensure that the data stored is accurate and that is quickly accessible for them to easily generate different types of reports, such as open orders, on-time shipment, late shipment, etc.

Ready to learn more?

Brands and retailers can increase loyalty and efficiency through collaborative, flexible and responsive supply chain execution. New technologies, like Inspectorio Tracking, provide retailers with advanced data, automation functionalities, and full visibility over the production chain to take advantage of new opportunities and become consumers’ preferred destination in the new wave of brand loyalty.

If you are curious to learn more about how to streamline your operations to improve on-time delivery performance, contact us at sales@inspectorio.com.