Your supply chain is the beating heart of your business. But how do you keep it healthy?
Supply chain planning is essential for maintaining efficient operations, from supplier to customer, and balancing supply and demand. By using automation to aid your supply chain planning, you’ll be able to:
Effortlessly meet demand and keep customers happy
Identify, predict, and mitigate risks to your supply chain
Enhance the efficiency of your operations and streamline processes
Lower your operating costs without sacrificing on quality
Read on to discover more about how automation can play a key role during each stage of the supply chain planning process.
From the sourcing of materials to manufacturing and fulfilment, careful planning will keep your supply chain running as effectively as possible. By implementing a four-pronged approach, covering supply, demand, production, and sales and operations, you can ensure your entire supply chain will be included in your strategy. This lets you break down different focus areas for manageable and thorough planning.
Supply planning
Managing the supply and demand of products and services keeps your business on track to meet financial objectives and achieve growth. Failing to manage supply leads to unfulfilled orders, creating unhappy customers, damaging your reputation, and leading to a loss of business.
By determining how to balance the supply of your products with the demand from your customers, you’ll be primed to keep your business running smoothly.
How automation can help
Automation can aid this process by improving collaboration across your internal terms and with your suppliers. You can use automation applications to increase visibility into your supply chain and acquire real-time updates. This helps you craft an accurate supply plan that gives you the agility to respond to changes in demand.
Demand planning
Ensuring that you have the correct amount of supply to meet demand is, of course, essential for supply chain planning. But that supply is useless if availability is poor. By forecasting fluctuations in demand, you can ensure you have enough products or services in the right place to meet that demand in an efficient and profitable way.
Automation aids forecasting by providing easy access to on-demand historical sales data. If you’re running manual processes that data simply might not exist for you to evaluate. You can use this unified data from multiple channels to create accurate forecasting models, without the need for vast amounts of manual data input from one system to another. Another way automation can help here is to speed up processes such as selecting and onboarding new suppliers – which becomes crucial when your existing supply lines fail or cannot provide the volume you require.
Production planning
As a vital link in the supply chain, production requires careful planning to ensure an appropriate allocation of resources to maintain output and remove inefficiency or wastage. By setting production targets, determining required resources, and creating a production schedule, your business will be able to meet deadlines and SLAs with ease.
You can further augment your production plan by using automation to connect your order systems to your production plan. It’s gaps between systems and silos of data that make it hard to manage production. Connecting your systems means you can keep up to date with any changes in production requirements and avoid bottlenecks.
Sales and operations planning
Effective supply chain management isn’t something you just do once. It requires periodic reflection and updating to keep your business operating to its full potential. Sales and operations planning involves routinely identifying what specific operational processes can be put in place to enable supply, enhance distribution, and ensure products always reach customers. You’ll also want to protect your profitability and remain competitive. One of the ways to do that is through adjustments in pricing, which often requires analysis and multi-level approvals, but you also want it to happen fast.
With automation, you’ll have a single source of truth that you can use as a trusted source to inform this decision-making. Automation unifies your data and removes siloes, meaning more accurate forecasting, reporting, analysis and approvals. For pricing adjustments you can build and automate processes to check, adjust and approve new pricing frameworks fast, making sure you keep up with changes in your market.
Each supply chain is different, and planning should be tailored to your business’ goals and needs. No matter your industry, automation can make supply chain planning more accurate and efficient. You’ll gain access to vital, high-quality data and be able to streamline processes across the supply chain.
Discover how Bizagi can help your business conduct effective supply chain planning and unlock the benefits of automation by visiting our supply chain page.
