Supply Chain Execution
Supply Chain Execution: Optimizing Operations for Success
In highly competitive and demand-driven markets, efficient supply chain execution (SCE) is crucial for achieving business goals. Supply chain execution represents a set of critical, often complex and interconnected processes that manage the daily operations of the supply chain to ensure products are delivered to customers in a timely and efficient manner.
Our solutions for Supply Chain Execution
What is supply chain execution?
Supply chain execution is a set of operational processes that includes order management, logistics, warehousing, and transportation. These processes are essential for coordinating and monitoring the activities necessary to meet customer needs, while maintaining operational efficiency and optimizing costs throughout the supply chain.
Key components of supply chain execution
- Order management: Involves processing customer orders from receipt to delivery. This includes verifying product availability, confirming orders, and planning shipments.
- Warehouse management: Entails managing storage, handling, and inventory of products. Key processes include receiving goods, storage, picking, packing, and shipping.
- Logistics management: Involves planning, implementing, and controlling the efficient flow and storage of goods. This includes managing transportation (inbound and outbound) and coordinating with logistics service providers.
- Transportation management: Includes planning and optimizing transportation routes, fleet management, shipment tracking, and collaboration with carriers to ensure timely deliveries.
Objectives of supply chain execution
The primary goal of supply chain execution is to improve the responsiveness and operational efficiency of the supply chain. This involves:
Optimizing operational costs:
Reducing transportation, warehousing, and order management costs
Increasing response speed:
Improving delivery times and reducing order cycle times
Improving visibility:
Ensuring complete transparency throughout the supply chain for better exception management and informed decision-making
Enhancing inventory accuracy:
Ensuring inventory levels are optimized to meet customer demand without excesses or shortages
The supply chain execution process flow
The supply chain execution process can be divided into several phases, which often overlap and interact with each other:
- Order receipt: Acquiring orders through various channels (online, EDI, phone) and entering them into order management systems
- Order processing: Verifying product availability, planning production (if necessary), and preparing for shipment
- Warehouse management: Receiving, storing, and managing inventory, including picking, packing, and shipping processes
- Transportation management: Planning shipments, selecting carriers, tracking shipments, and managing deliveries
- Delivery and feedback: Executing final delivery to customers and collecting feedback to improve future processes
Technologies transforming supply chain management
There are four technological areas revolutionizing the supply chain:
- Internet of Things (IoT): The IoT enables real-time determination of the exact location of items, monitoring their movement and storage conditions, thus revolutionizing inventory monitoring and warehouse management. RFID technology, in particular, allows tracking the precise location of goods at all times and quickly sharing information across supply chain channels via radio data transfer. Bluetooth, NFC tags, and GPS also perform similar functions, albeit on different scales depending on specific cases.
- Analytics: Using quantitative data helps extrapolate information and optimize decision-making throughout the supply chain. Today, advanced analytics provides valuable support for Supply Chain Managers to interpret collected data. There are four types of supply chain analytics: descriptive analytics, which ensures visibility; predictive analytics, which forecasts future trends such as demand; prescriptive analytics, which suggests solutions to problems; and cognitive analytics, which answers questions by mimicking human reasoning.
- Cloud computing: Cloud computing allows the integration of different platforms and adoption of scalable solutions, making information and data available on demand, and overcoming siloed management. This makes the supply chain more responsive and agile, allowing quick analysis and satisfaction of new requests by connecting more resources and tools.
Thanks to the sedApta Suite, we can offer companies an integrated ecosystem that supports and coordinates the interoperability of functions and processes, optimizing supply chain execution in multi-role and multi-product contexts. The modularity of the sedApta Suite enables companies to quickly adapt to market needs and improve their operational efficiency.
In conclusion, effective supply chain execution is essential for business success, as it ensures that daily operations are performed efficiently, reducing costs and improving customer satisfaction.