Business

Inventory Management: Making it Part of Your Supply Chain

In times of fast-changing customer demands, high expectations on quality and individualization, having an efficient performance of your supply chain is very important.  So, how do you achieve this? The best method for enhancing the efficiency of a supply chain is integrating all departments to reduce potential conflicts that arise when each tries to achieve separate goals. For example, the procurement might target to guarantee material availability with minimal inventory, but the production unit is focused on doing with the available resources. To improve the efficiency of your supply chain, here are the things to focus on: 

Combine Information from All Departments and Use it appropriately

Combining information requires you to start by developing a cross-departmental system, which allows you to collect information while factoring specific needs for every department. In this respect, the synchronization of data from the supply chain would help clarify the critical interdependences betweendepartments. Furthermore, it would eliminate media disruptions. An integrated system would further allow experts from various departments to pool knowledge which will be vital for planning purposes. 

Developing Common Goals 

For your supply chain to be functional and holistic, it requires more than a common database. More importantly, you need a consistent operation mode to help the company reach its key objectives. However, different objectives and incentives in different departments can turn into a major obstacle. For example, the purchase departments might be motivated by negotiated supplier discounts while the planning unit targets keeping the stock figures low. 

In order to achieve the overall goal of the organization in line with its core mission, all the subordinate targets need to be dismissed and a common target adopted. This will mean inventory optimization for your supply chain. 

The Right Visualization 

To achieve high efficiency from your supply chain system, one of the things that you need to do is doing away with outdated tools, such as access and excel solutions. Instead, you should adopt more robust tools, especially those that focus on visualizations. Because the human brain analyzes images faster than data, information presented in the form of charts and forecasted sales support is likely to help you more in sound decision making.  

Whether you have a business in manufacturing as brought out here, or any other niche, integrating all units’ with the supply chain can help to reduce conflict between departmental goals.  The overall goal will be helping departments in your organization to work coherently and achieve the primary business mission.

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