The supply chain is a term that describes all the activities and functions involved in moving a product or service from supplier to customer. The supply chain’s primary purpose is to deliver products to customers at a profit. The supply chain will provide products at a cost (or price) that covers its expenses, including labor, materials, and overhead costs. As part of doing so, it will include processes for receiving, storing, moving, and delivering those products. A good experience for the consumer is also important because they might buy more products from the company if they enjoy shopping there. The supply chain can be divided into two main categories: manufacturing supply chains and distribution channels.
Supply chains can be complicated, especially when considering the many steps involved in getting a product from its origin to its final destination. For example, it’s not uncommon for products to move through multiple warehouses and cross international borders before reaching a consumer. This means many opportunities for errors or delays in the process.
The old process is still often paper-based and manual. Supply chain management software helps organizations improve efficiency by automating manual processes so employees can focus on higher-value tasks such as customer service or strategic planning.
The company’s supply chain processes are often not integrated with other business functions. For example, sales reps might use a separate system to place orders than the purchasing department uses to track them. The same is true for shipping documents and payments. So it’s no surprise that many companies have weak relationships with their suppliers — they don’t know what they’re doing!
The supply chain has long been a source of frustration for retailers, who have struggled to keep up with the speed of technological change. But Silicon Valley investors have been pouring in money to fix all of the issues, and now, it’s been completely revolutionized and modernized, which is helping. The future of retail lies in data, technology, and analytics.
Retailers today have access to vast amounts of data that helps them make smarter decisions about their operations. This data can be used for predictive analytics that helps retailers forecast demand accurately so that they don’t end up overstocking or understocking products. It can also be used for customer analytics that helps retailers understand what products consumers want or need so that they can offer them at competitive prices.
The traditional supply chain had many problems that needed to be solved. These included:
-Lack of visibility into the supply chain (i.e., where does my product come from? How long does it take to get there?)
-Lack of automation (i.e., how do I automate this process so I can speed up delivery times?)
-Lack of collaboration between different departments within a company (i.e., marketing can’t talk with sales until they know what they want, but they don’t know what they want unless they talk with each other)
-Lack of forecasting supply chain slowdowns – leading to overstocking.
With Silicon Valley investor modernization efforts, we should start to see prices come down due to more accurately forecasting the supply chain and managing it more closely.
