With online sales booming, alongside an ever-increasing population of consumers, business supply chains are becoming more complex. Liv Candy explains how businesses can embrace complexities associated with large supply chains and how value can be gained from the vast amounts of data available.
As businesses look to grow and continue to serve an existing client base, supply chains simultaneously become more complex.
Supplier relationships are vital to developing a footprint with existing customers as well as reaching new ones. However, managing these relationships, which are crucial to customer satisfaction, while negotiating, evaluating and enhancing them, add to the complexity. Supplier collaboration is fundamental to achieving success.
Supply chains used to be comparable for a range of customers. However, today, with increased product lines, various shipping options and business landscapes rapidly becoming more global, the supply chain continues to grow. More steps are needed to complete orders and there is a requirement for visibility into these granular steps; firstly, to help manage exceptions in real-time and secondly to set the right expectations for customers with greater transparency.
Strategies must be flexible and agile to accommodate each customer order, to ensure it arrives on time at the lowest possible cost. The reality is we are dealing with micro supply chains for each customer order.
There is a tsunami of data across supply chains, which could be used to help businesses make informed decisions. However, trying to understand it can be overwhelming. Gaps in data tend to form when a business starts to deal with a growing number of systems, suppliers and partners, which increases the need for supply chain visibility. That said, companies can take control of the big data opportunity with a systematic approach and embed data driven methodologies into their DNA.
Complexity in the supply chain will continue to be a significant challenge for organisations, especially as customer expectations increase alongside goals for business growth. The answer is not to make the supply chain less complex, but to figure out how to embrace the complexity.
We help our customers to understand, map and connect their data via our online tool – the Valpak Insight Platform.
Our Platform enables users to unearth opportunities that optimise, strengthen and enforce decisions across supply chains. It can display product data and supplier responses, as well as generate risk analyses that can be linked to responsible sourcing.
We use our experience in producer responsibility compliance knowledge and data collection systems, to help organisations manage complexities within their supply chains.
Our Data Insights team collect and collate data on behalf of our customers, then produce clear and easy to understand reports, which are all accessible via the Insight Platform at the click of a button.
Information is presented in a clear format to aid the decision-making process, helping executives and category buyers to manage corporate social responsibility and environmental goals.
Via the Insight Platform we can provide detailed packaging and recyclability information for over 1.5 million products sold in the last year and can benchmark the recyclability of 2.8 million tonnes of packaging. After all, we like to embrace complexity!
If you would like to find out more about all our Insight Platform can offer, please watch our short video or get in touch to book in a demo.