Supply Chain Management Demystification: A Crash Course in the Lifeblood of Your Business

Your supply chain is the heartbeat of your business. If you can manage it effectively you’ll reduce costs and achieve a much faster production cycle. Granted, in today’s uncertain times, making that happen is more challenging than ever. But the key to accomplishing it still remains the same—you and your trading partners’ supply chain data. This article takes on supply chain management demystification.

The trick, of course, is to find the right tools to gain actionable insights from that data, answer important questions, and uncover trends. It’s critical to be able to identify and manage some of these common problems to ensure your supply chain fulfills demand and remains highly responsive:

• Determine rate of orders on-time, in full
• Know when an order is complete (even if it’s been changed, products substituted, or split into multiple shipments)
• Alert business partners of a problem before physical goods are shipped
• Identify which suppliers are the quickest and most reliable
• Allow other departments (finance, customer service) real-time access to see orders or invoices with discrepancies

All of these issues can turn into much larger headaches and set your business back if you don’t have a way to manage them and respond in a timely manner. 

Let’s say you order 100 of a specific product from one of your suppliers but only receive 50. Unbeknownst to you, your supplier sent this order in multiple shipments. If you have no way to track the shipment information from your supplier, you are going to believe you were short-shipped. 

On the other side, there are many issues that come with receiving and fulfilling customer orders. For example, let’s say you receive an order of 25 for a particular product. Then, just before you ship, your customer sends a purchase order change, updating the quantity to 30. But because you have no visibility into this requested change, you ship the 25 anyway. Now your customer has charged you a fine, and it’s eaten into your profit from that order.

Whether you’re a retailer, distributor or supplier, these are major headaches waiting to happen. 

It’s because your supply chain data by itself can be complex, but you shouldn’t have to stress about it or let it manage you. It’s the processes that impact your business that matter most. 

With Syncrofy for Supply Chain, you can take the real-world chaos out of your supply chain and take back control over your data. Remind your supplier if their delivery appointment to your warehouse is coming up, and they haven’t sent you an ASN, preventing you from preparing to receive that shipment. Get notified when your customer changes an order, so you can change the shipment before the goods go out, helping you avoid those pesky fines and fees for order errors. 

Quickly search for orders and view all of the related data (both your own and your business partner’s). 

You can even invite your partners to use Syncrofy so it’s easier to collaborate, solve issues, and answer supply chain-related questions together. 

The bottom line is that Syncrofy for Supply Chain helps you save time, gain insights, and achieve full visibility when it comes to your supply chain execution. That means saving money in the long run and streamlining communication between you and your partners.

Interested in a sneak peek of Syncrofy’s new supply chain functionality? Click here!