C-Suite POV: Breaking Down Supply Chain Concerns & How To Achieve Greater Visibility

As a retail executive, you’re responsible for the strategic vision of your entire operation.

But to create that vision you need everyone in your organization on the same page. That’s easier said than done over the last few years with the myriad of supply chain concerns caused by several factors beginning with the global pandemic.

Recently, 72% of supply chain leaders admitted to lacking end-to-end visibility. And it gets worse—only 19% of organizations have fully integrated scenario planning into their supply chain strategies when disaster does strike.

But fear not! There’s hope for those who aren’t sure where to turn or how to put a stop to the recurring issues that plague your organization. 

Let’s take a look at some of the supply chain concerns that can be corrected, how Syncrofy can help you achieve the visibility and results you’re striving for, and how it brings together your entire retail operation. 

Don’t accept the ‘status quo’ with your supply chain

Late shipments are one of the top concerns for retail C-suites and for good reason. They have a tendency to be the root cause of significant revenue leakage for many organizations. In fact, supply chain disruptions are responsible for 44% of the total impact on revenue management.

Here’s another eye-opening number: on average, 3% of all retailer sales are lost to late shipments, which means it’s that much more critical to get a handle on. Unfortunately, that’s a result of not having visibility into your supply chain—specifically your supplier’s progress on your orders and shipments. To put this in perspective, if your annual revenue for a given year was $5 million, it’s likely that you lost around $150,000 of that due to late shipments. Not exactly small potatoes. 

The accuracy of your inventory is also critical because it has a tremendous trickle down effect on the rest of your operation, including your customers. You may have come to the point where you accept frequent stock-outs, uncertain supply levels, or the constant chaos and disorganization of your warehouse. But you shouldn’t.

Maintaining high customer satisfaction is at the top of the list as well. You want to maintain good relationships with both your suppliers and customers but that’s not easy when you have continuous supply chain issues. Without a way to collaborate in real-time with your suppliers on potential issues, it’s difficult to view order-related data or be proactive about managing exceptions. In both cases, your relationship with your suppliers and customers will suffer as a result.

Don’t be resigned to the fact that these concerns are inevitable and just have to be “managed” as best they can. Labeling those blind spots as simply the “cost of doing business” won’t serve you well in the long haul and will eventually have a negative impact on your supply chain. Just because it’s something you’ve always done, doesn’t mean it has to be that way forever. 

There’s another new normal taking shape and it revolves around creating a proactive process to remedy flaws in your transaction processes, fixing the root causes of late or inaccurate shipments, and building stronger relationships with your suppliers through effective communication.

The hard truths of poor visibility

• $1.77 trillion lost to global inventory distortion in 2023 (IHL Group)
• Up to 45% of one year’s profits lost to supply chain disruptions over a decade (McKinsey)
• 82% of companies faced a significant disruption last year—only 14% had resilient visibility (Accenture)

Why you need all your departments running on Syncrofy

Syncrofy, “The AI-Enabled Supply Chain Platform,” is your ultimate weapon for eliminating late shipments, aiding your inventory management, and preventing late payments. It’s a powerful, cloud-based data visibility platform that breaks down barriers across your retail supply chain and helps you gain a clear view of your entire operation. Here’s what it can help you achieve:

Improved customer satisfaction & loyalty. Syncrofy makes it easy to administer and manage vendor compliance programs, while also offering the ability to create configurable vendor scorecards on-demand by bringing together all of your multi-enterprise data into a single platform. It also allows you to obtain calculations at the line item level and manage different “in full” rules for individual suppliers. This enables you to improve supply chain performance, enhance communication with trading partners, and protect your profits.

Maximized inventory accuracy. Syncrofy provides you with full supply chain visibility and actionable insights from day one—without the need to configure, map, or develop a specialized data warehouse. It calculates fill rate and lead time for both orders and shipments and reconciles invoices against POs, shipment documentation, and receipts to identify quantity and price discrepancies. This empowers you to monitor and compare suppliers on KPIs to improve your order fulfillment accuracy and timeliness and prevent stockouts.

Reduction in revenue leakage. Syncrofy makes lost revenue a thing of the past. How? It enables you to configure proactive notifications to alert you when a shipment is late so you can take appropriate action to increase your replenishment orders or order more goods from an alternative supplier. It then creates an exception when a Shipment Date is one day before (or on the same day, or the day after) the Requested Delivery Date. That information will be stored in the order so you can report on your supplier’s on-time delivery rate over time. You will also get an alert the moment your criteria is not met so you can resolve the matter in a timely fashion. As a result, you’ll be able to reduce revenue leakage by up to 30% due to late shipments–allowing you to retain your revenue and save money.

Elimination of late payments. Because Syncrofy’s robust technology calculates fill rate and lead time for both orders and shipments you’ll be able to measure those key performance indicators and identify quantity and price discrepancies. As a result, it will help you eliminate late payments to suppliers, avoid credit holds, and save an average of 2% on payments while improving your credit worthiness.

How Syncrofy brings together your entire retail operation

Syncrofy can help you achieve the visibility and results you strive for to ensure you maintain high customer satisfaction, increase revenue, and drive steady growth.

Since Syncrofy sits on top of all your B2B/EDI transactions (regardless of silo or department), it unifies your entire organization by creating a single version of the truth. It also enables your supply chain planning and control tower applications to easily ingest real-time order data. When real-time, accurate order data is exchanged between you, your external partners, customers, suppliers, and distributors, your supply chain applications become optimized—just the way they should be.

You’re not just reacting to supply chain issues with Syncrofy—you’re predicting, preventing, and resolving them before they impact your bottom line. Syncrofy integrates directly with your B2B/EDI data and unifies your teams across procurement, finance, logistics, and operations under a single source of truth. Accoding to Gartner, companies with real-time visibility and predictive capabilities are seeing up to 20% reduction in operational costs and 15% improved service levels as well as:

• Reduced revenue leakage by up to 30%
• Reduced issue resolution time by 35-50%
• Improved working capital efficiency by 15-25%

With Syncrofy bringing all multi-enterprise data together into one platform, creating configurable scorecards on demand has never been easier. Being able to consistently evaluate your suppliers will facilitate accurate, actionable, and productive collaboration with them—and a more productive supply chain. 

Are you ready to lead, or risk falling behind?

Explore how Syncrofy can help you gain complete control and achieve full visibility of your entire retail operation and request a FREE trial today.