Every Supply Chain leader seeks an optimally designed network to reduce costs while improving its resiliency, efficiency, customer service levels, and competitive advantage. Furthermore, business and Supply Chain leaders understand that changes in demand, service expectations, market costs, and reverse logistics can affect the effectiveness of Supply Chain networks. Learn more about how Supply Chain design technology can benefit the company.

It could potentially be a business advantage to periodically re-evaluate the Supply Chain design or determine whether a restructure is needed. However, this can be quite costly and time-consuming when done manually. Most companies are still in the early stages of their efforts to connect the entire Supply Chain with a seamless flow of data. Digital technologies can deliver major benefits to efficiency and transparency that are yet to be fully realized.

Companies now have access to new digital solutions for running scenarios, assessing trade-offs, improving transparency, accelerating responses, and even changing the cost structures. Let’s have a look at the benefits of using technology for Supply Chain design, besides an empowerment of your employees.

The benefits of using technology for Supply Chain design

• Make more automated decisions
  While most global Supply Chain-reliant companies have already embraced the power of data and advanced analytics across their company, the vast majority have been working with out-of-the-box tools cobbled together with in-house applications or spreadsheet-based solutions. Advanced technology can help the Supply Chain use mathematical solvers and algorithms to find the best decision or decisions for a given business problem within a defined set of constraints.

• Quicker deployment to users in the organization
  Advanced technology offers the possibility of creating a personalized experience. With apps, you will be able to create a tailored solution with the appropriate user experience for anyone in the organization to facilitate democratized, AI-powered decision-making.

• Gain proactive insights
  Leading companies can apply advanced technologies to fundamentally rethink and transform their Supply Chain, enhance their real-time understanding of activity in complex supply networks, and leverage continuous scenario planning to optimize the balance of cost against risk and agility of their network footprint.
  
  
• Continually revisit the Supply Chain design
  In other words, by adopting new technologies and the practice of continuous design, companies can reduce risk, improve resilience, and turn their Supply Chain challenges into a competitive advantage. By applying advanced algorithms, companies can continually revisit and adapt to make the best decisions balancing profitability, service, risk, and sustainability.
  
  
• Make faster decisions
  With an end-to-end extensible data model, AI, and rich algorithms, Supply Chain leaders can use simulations to quickly learn how to best respond to changing conditions. They can adjust scenarios and options in these models to identify which decisions best support agility and resilience. The best decisions require the right balance of profitability, service, risk, and sustainability.
  
  
• Drive insights through relevant data
  Designing a Supply Chain that is both resilient and efficient while addressing increasingly complex and nuanced markets is challenging. Supply Chains will have to consider multiple dimensions: proximity to customer markets, diverse customer service requirements (including after-sales service and reverse logistics), sources of raw materials, proximity to key suppliers and ecosystem partners, risks, regulations, customs, duties, and sustainability factors.

In the following, we give an example of how data can be utilized in the model to drive insights through relevant data: