Improving Your Supply Chain Efficiency in Four Simple Steps
Your supply chain is a vitally important part of your overall business strategy. With that being said, how can you make sure your supply chain is running smoothly?
An efficient supply chain will not only help your business save money - but improve your customer satisfaction through reduced wait times. All in all - giving you the competitive edge you need within your industry.
On the other hand, an ineffective supply chain (or one that is not performing as it should) will end up draining your resources and wasting valuable time.
Optimising and streamlining your supply chain doesn’t have to be as difficult a task as it may seem. Below we at
InXpress Sandton have summed up some simple steps that you can take in order to improve efficiency along each step of your supply chain.
Four Steps To Improve Your Supply Chain Efficiency:
1. Evaluate Your Suppliers
In order to streamline and optimise your supply chain, you'll need to re-evaluate the process with your suppliers. Ask yourself. How does their performance affects your business? When evaluating or choosing suppliers, consider the following factors -
- Their Communication - How responsive are they?
- Their Dependability - Are they Consistent?
- Their Speed - How quickly they’re able to regularly fulfil your orders.
When you have found suppliers that are able to consistently and reliably meet your needs, you’ll need to focus on forming a healthy on-going partnership with them.
2. Regularly Review Your Strategies
Your supply chain should be adaptive. In order to be adaptive you’ll need to regularly review your strategies. This will help you establish what’s working and what’s no longer working or necessary.
Regularly reviews will also help you identify different risk elements and their estimated financial impacts - mitigate the risk of theft and fraud, avoid bottlenecks in the supply chain and streamline your overall operations.
3. Embrace Technology & Automate Processes
As with most elements of business - technology can be integrated into many aspects of your supply chain in order to automate and speed up processes and eliminate the risk of costly human errors.
Begin by reviewing your existing processes and determining any areas where the implementation of certain technologies would be beneficial. Technology such as;
- Shipment Tracking Tools
- Cloud Software
- Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Automated Sorters that use Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Technology.
4. Identify opportunities for Outsourcing
Logistics can be complicated and chaotic to navigate, and so - It’s always best for businesses to identify areas where it would be beneficial to use a
third party logistics provider.
Third-party providers take full responsibility of the processes they are handling and their expertise allows them to better mitigate risks while finding cost effective solutions.
Put simply,
outsourcing certain aspects of your logistics to a 3PL partner will free up your time and resources, allowing you to focus on other core aspects within your supply chain.
To Conclude:
If the current performance of your supply chain is not to your satisfaction. There is no need to be discouraged. Taking the time to focus on finding reliable suppliers, reviewing your strategies, opting to outsource and embracing what technology has to offer can all go a long way in reducing your costs and making your customers happy! (which at the end of the day is actually what matters the most).
Looking for a reliable logistics partner?
Contact us at InXpress Sandton - We’re here to handle your shipping, so that you don’t have to!
SPACES, Design Quarter, Leslie Road, Fourways, Johannesburg, 2191
010 745 7774
sales.sandton@inxpress.com