5 Key Tips to Assess Supply Chain Resilience Effectively | Simio

A functional and highly flexible supply chain is crucial to meeting manufacturing deadlines and optimizing production cycles. Approximately 79% of companies with high-performing supply chains achieve increased revenue growth when compared to the average within their industries. Enterprises with optimized supply chains also reduce the cost of managing supplies by 15% and boast of faster cash to cash operational cycles.

Despite the importance of a high-performing supply chain, approximately 57% of enterprises in the industrial sector still struggle with visibility challenges across their supply chains. Enterprise struggling with visibility says that challenges with finding the right tool for monitoring and evaluating supply chain performance are at the core of their visibility struggles. Alleviating these challenges is where today’s timely tips come into the picture.

Tips for Assessing Your Supply Chain’s Current State and Developing a Resilient System

The digital transformation journey taking place across every facet of the business world has produced diverse technological solutions that simplify the process of tracking supply chain data. These solutions mean tracking or capturing supply chain data is not much of a challenge and gaining insight is where enterprises face problems. Here again, technology provides ready answers in the form of supply chain software applications. These applications include demand forecasting tools, simulation modeling and digital twin solutions, among others.

1. Assemble an Assessment Plan – The first step to assessing your supply chain’s current state and improving its performance, is setting specified goals of what the assessment intends to track and improve. A detailed assessment plan ensures stakeholders remain focused on the goals required to improve supply chain performances. A comprehensive assessment plan relies on operational data to determine historical supply chain performances against different production timelines.

To accomplish this, developing a simulation model of your supply chain using historical data will help with mapping out its current performances. With knowledge of the impact of different systems within your supply chain, you can proceed to develop optimized plans to improve its performance.

2. Conduct a Qualitative Readiness Assessment – Improving supply chain performance does not occur without having an understanding of the human, technology, and financial resources required to move from subpar to high-performing. A qualitative readiness assessment is engineered to assess your organization’s predisposition to change, the competency levels of personnel, and available technical know-how.

A Kubler-Ross change curve analysis may prove useful in accessing the attitude of your workforce and how they may react to the large-scale introduction of digital transformation solutions. An excellent assessment will provide insight into the level of competency at the individual and organizational levels of your enterprise. With this knowledge, building the capacity to develop a data-driven, flexible, and high-performing supply chain becomes possible.

3. Assess the Capability of Existing Technology Systems – Over 90% of companies have integrated the use of digital transformation solutions to capture data but less than 40% use technology to monitor supply chain performance. Data collection is crucial to keeping track of inventory and supply timelines within an enterprise but simply collecting data doesn’t monitor your supply chain’s performance.

A comprehensive monitoring strategy requires real-time capabilities that include a triage of systems from data capturing hardware to analytical software platforms. For example, while RFID tags, IoT systems, and edge devices can track supply chains, digital twin software is needed to gain real-time insight at the organization or systemic level. If on assessment, the capability to monitor your supply chain doesn’t exist, the next step is developing that capability by obtaining the required solutions.

4. Employ a Comprehensive Supply Chain Software – Putting your data to work starts with taking ownership of the right software solution. In the case of assessing and developing a resilient supply chain, a simulation and digital twin modeling software empower you to accomplish both. For example, developing simulation models of your supply chain ensure that you can conduct assessments of its current state and determine how crucial change factors will affect future performance. These data-driven insights provide you with the information needed to develop flexible strategies to deal with supply chain disruptions.

For real-time monitoring, a digital twin model remains one of the most powerful tools for tracking and evaluating supply chain performances. Digital twins of your supply chain can be used to develop optimization plans or create real-time solutions to unforeseen bottlenecks.

5. Define Your Short Term vs. Long Term Achievements – Evaluating the successes achieved with the deployment of digital transformation solutions provide the needed incentives to keep going. Achieving these goals serve as a morale boost to shop floor workers and captures current improvements from yesterday’s challenges. Establishing a list of achievable milestones will capture progress and incentivize everyone to continue pursuing a high-performing supply chain despite the setbacks that may occur.

Conclusion

A dynamic supply chain is crucial to meeting deadlines in today’s dynamic environment. Enterprises must adapt to developing sustainable supply chains to deal with increased demand, increasing manufacturing costs, and other environmental issues that can derail the supply of materials or products. Implementing or expanding your digital transformation strategy to comprehensively monitor your supply chain is the only process to developing a high-performing supply chain.