Post Index:
- More Strategy for Your Strategic Supply Chain Planning
- Finding a Supply Chain Partner
- Recommended Downloads
Figuring out how to prevail over global supply uncertainty has become an urgent strategic imperative for supply chain teams. To cope with an environment chronically buffeted by severe disruptions—“the new normal”—means taking on capricious material and labor shortages, volatile production and transportation constraints, fluctuating commodity prices, and more. The odds against supply chain success are tougher. The only way to beat them is to sense changes sooner, respond to them faster, collaborate with each other closer, and convert available information into more intelligent decisions.
In other words, put more “strategy” into our strategic supply chain planning.
To do this, we’ll need to develop the innovative core competencies that can help us survive near-term performance threats and set us up to thrive over time in a volatile world. The groundwork starts with gaining complete visibility into our supply chain environment. We must process all available data into one shared vision of the truth then generate insights from that information that enhance our ability to sense risks and opportunities. Most crucially, supply chain plans must align with the real world. We must have confidence in how we comprehend and reconcile what we can produce with what we ideally should produce, given the most sophisticated available demand projections and the most efficient possible allocations of resources to manufacturing and fulfillment.
Industry research and analysis firms have pointed out that achieving such a high level of performance requires a holistic planning approach combining timely problem-solving with the development of essential core competencies for tomorrow. Pursuing both tasks at once calls for a comprehensive planning platform that respects the uniqueness of each company and the best way forward. Every strategic planning journey will include elements like value-mapping current processes, reconciling stakeholder perspectives, identifying capability gaps, and prioritizing opportunities for improvement. Where we specifically start this journey and how fast we travel it must, however, be determined by our individual business imperatives. And for that, we’ll want a planning platform partner—one that makes it easy for us to achieve early, visible wins in the battle against uncertainty, then let us move forward at our own pace. We can carry out our digital transformation and develop new core competencies in disciplines ranging from demand sensing and statistical forecasting to product life cycle management, S&OP, transportation optimization, production scheduling, replenishment planning, multichannel fulfillment, inventory optimization, and so much more.
But if finding such a partner seems daunting, maybe not so much.
One place to gather insights is from market evaluations completed by third parties such as Gartner and Nucleus Research. For example, the 2022 Gartner Supply Chain Planning Magic Quadrant, examines the supply chain planning vendor community through the lens of five critical capabilities. John Galt Solutions was named a Leader in the latest edition, a position that we believe underlines the value of our innovative application of machine learning and AI to today’s pressing supply chain challenges. Many qualities set our Atlas Planning Platform apart, including our ongoing R&D investment, low-code/no-code approach, ability to seamlessly integrate across a multi-enterprise systems landscape, and capability to process both structured and unstructured data sources. But above all, we believe that, in the current climate of fluctuating demand, supply uncertainty, and unpredictable labor and transportation shortages, the most potent weapon in the planning arsenal is the supply chain digital twin. We believe it’s the best tool available to accurately model the behavior of a supply chain and explore planning options thoroughly before applying them in the real world.
