Digitalizing supply chain issue management with a workflow-driven, multienterprise collaboration solution enables supply chain teams and their upstream and downstream partners to capture, analyze, resolve, correct, and prevent supply chain exceptions.
Supply chain issue management is a business process that is best executed as a cross-company process, yet it has not been digitalized in most organizations. Dealing with issues like late shipments, material shortages, changes in production quantities, and damaged goods is often a firefighting exercise managed and resolved using unstructured and decentralized tools like phone calls, emails, video conferencing, and spreadsheets. As a result, supply chain leaders often lack the visibility to see and respond to threats in the supply chain as they are developing, and much of the information needed to drive supply chain performance improvements is lost or never collected. These issues can escalate into supply chain disruptions that drive up the cost of goods sold (COGS) and reduce on-time, in-full delivery (OTIF).
A recent survey of more than 200 supply chain leaders found that the current process for managing supply chain issues is causing serious business challenges.
- 51% identified the lengthy response/resolution process for supply chain issues as a significant risk to supply chain performance.
- 51% reported that recurring issues with the same suppliers are causing serious production delays.
- 43% said that the lack of cross-organization and real-time issue visibility are significantly impacting supply chain execution.
The survey also revealed that most supply chain management teams lack a comprehensive view of all issues across the organization, the status of their resolution processes, and their potential impact. Leadership teams rely on ad hoc reports from various sources that are managed and escalated via email, with no real visibility into past trends or individual steps being taken to resolve issues. And there is no visibility into potential disruptions or risks created as these issues go unresolved.
A better way to resolve supply chain issues and prevent disruptions
Digitalizing the process of supply chain issue management with a workflow-driven, multienterprise collaboration solution enables supply chain teams and their upstream and downstream partners to capture, analyze, resolve, correct, and prevent supply chain exceptions. Dashboards provide actionable visibility to managers and executives across the end-to-end supply chain. Issues can easily be captured, monitored, and grouped by priority, due dates, issue resolution status, sites, and partners. Issues can be analyzed and the proper teams of subject matter experts can be assigned. And supply chain partners can collaborate more effectively on supply chain issues using a single source of shared truth. This leads to faster issue resolution times and a significant reduction in the total number of issues.
This is where TraceLink Supply Chain Work Management can step in to help. With the Incident Management process, you can digitalize the way you manage supply chain disruptions across your partner network, providing you with:
- Crystal-clear supply chain visibility at all levels of the organization and to end-to-end supply chain partners.
- Actionable drill-down dashboards into individual incidents, so you can assign them to the right team of subject matter experts and speed issue resolution.
- Pre-built incident management processes and a change request process that enables you to start digitalizing critical workflows immediately.
- Intuitive reporting functionality that empowers employees to easily flag issues of all types as they are occurring.
- A single source of shared data that enables supply chain partners to report issues themselves and collaborate more effectively on exceptions.
The benefits of digitalizing supply chain issue management
One company that digitalized Incident Management saw significant supply chain performance improvements, including:
- 65% reduction in days to close an incident
- 50% reduction in repeat deviations
- 97% reduction in manufacturing disruptions
- 82% improvement in delivery performance
Companies can lower the cost of goods sold (COGS) by reducing fees associated with expediting and express shipping, overtime, scrap, rework, and material costs. On-time, in-full (OTIF) performance can be improved by decreasing order fulfillment cycle times. And revenues can be maximized due to fewer late deliveries and missed shipments, improving customer satisfaction and ultimately revenue.
Learn more in our Supply Chain Work Management Resource Center.
