As the world around us continues to change and at pace, reviewing systems, procurement processes, and supply chains have never been so important.
We understand the need to meet customer demand and requirements to grow your product-based business, and we know that businesses must meet these needs quickly and efficiently while also controlling costs.
That’s why in this post, we look at specific areas for improvement within supply chain management.
Improvements that offer resilience and agility, achieve best practices, deliver commercial benefits, and help meet all future requirements.
With an efficient and highly effective procurement process, you can speed up turnaround and production time, lighten workloads, reduce administrative errors, and create significant cost savings.
Steps to improve your supply chain management
1. Review your existing processes. The best and the first place to start is to review your current processes and supply chain. What’s working, and what is causing some areas of concern or bottlenecks to occur?
During this review make sure to speak to and include other stakeholders, as by gaining a complete perspective of your entire process, you’ll be in a better position to make informed and appropriate decisions for the business going forward.
Ultimately, you need to assess where your business is now — gaining an in-depth understanding of how you’re performing to understand better how to move forward.
2. Consolidate your suppliers. Carry out a review of all your suppliers; what suppliers do you ideally need, and have you investigated others?
By consolidating your suppliers, you can leverage economies of scale, reduce a lot of administrative burdens, and improve operational efficiency to develop a seamless service.
Working with a professional procurement partner who already has approved suppliers, you can improve the quality of your products, mitigate risk, and nurture relationships which can often be the key to future success.
3. Establish clear expectations. By setting clear expectations, you can not only increase efficiency, but you can also increase standards.
We would always recommend increasing transparency in your supply chain by conducting regular performance reviews in order to prevent delays to production lines and delivery.
Defining and setting SMART goals and objectives can help you identify what you really want to achieve from your supply chain processes.
4. Expand your network. When you open your network and look into overseas manufacturing, you can gain new perspectives, see future collaborations clearer, achieve much faster turnarounds, manage high-quality processes, increase business opportunities, and so much more.
5. Move with technology. Look at ways you can speed up processes by introducing digital and technology into specific areas. For example, can you automate your contract life cycle, supporting you with contract creations, real-time negotiations, faster signatures, automated reminders, and more?
Whether you’re developing a new product, moving to manufacture overseas, or looking to reduce costs, you will be able to incorporate the right technology and processes into your supply chain management by defining your priorities from the start. Increasing and improving efficiency and effectiveness at every stage.
Streamlining your supply chain management
A good procurement strategy should minimise error, create savings opportunities, identify appropriate suppliers, align purchasing with company objectives, increase efficiency, ensure compliance across all aspects of the supply chain, and generate more favourable contracts.
At GHL, we want to play our part in shaking off the outdated perception of procurement systems being long-drawn-out processes to instead procurement offering businesses innovation, creativity, agility, and cost savings in abundance, driving diversity and sustainability at every touchpoint.
Supply chain management contains numerous steps, from identifying the requirement for the goods to identifying and evaluating suitable suppliers, negotiating contracts, checking prototypes to receiving delivery. Steps that you must manage effectively and efficiently if you are to reduce errors and risk and get your products to market faster.
We believe that a robust supply chain is required to manage budgets, workflows, production timelines, and ultimately to ensure you continue to meet your aims and objectives, meeting the needs of the business.
GHL Procurement
As a leading international procurement partner, GHL helps you meet your customers’ needs cost-effectively, ensuring high-quality control standards and accuracy in manufacturing, always.
To find out how we can help you, email info@ghlprocurement.com or call us on +44 2922 671 826 today.
