Time to ‘Tune-up’ your Supply Chain

Posted on by jimsabogal

This month my focus is on Supply Chain in Life Sciences. As we head towards the end of the year budgets are being planned and IT projects are being prioritized for next year. Many companies are reviewing their current IT investments in light of mergers and acquisitions and projects that will add to the company’s business ability. My discussions have been around how best to improve your operations at a minimal cost. No one seems to want to buy new IT systems and they want to extract ‘value’ from their current IT systems.

Time to ‘Tune-up’ your Supply Chain

Ask yourself if you are getting the most from your current Supply Chain? Do you feel you’re gotten significant return from your SAP or Oracle investment? It seems everyone had one of these IT solutions. I believe the reason most companies should be looking at their Supply Chain is as follows:

  1. Most firms have invested in IT solutions to help react quickly and expect demand. We now are moving to ‘collaborative’ business processes as a means for extracting added value from your partners.
  2. Companies need to give supply chain ‘visibility’ so that the organization can make faster and better decisions.
  3. Business process improvements need re-training for your people.

I get this now how do I get there?

The answer is to create a ‘road-map’ for your supply chain that includes opportunities (projects) specific to your business systems. The key is how to develop this road-map. You need to have the following:

  • Supply Chain experts that can analyze your data and processes.
  • IT ability to look at how your SAP or Oracle solutions have been installed.
  • Our company has developed a unique set of tools that can analyze your Demand, Supply and Inventory.

We’ve created a project approach to this kind of analysis. Over the next few months I plan to promote this approach for Life Sciences and yet this approach is not just for this industry. I know this can be applied for any industry that is looking to get more value out of their IT investment in supply chain. As we gain traction in the market I hope to offer some proof points to this approach.

I would be interested in your comments and suggestions on this topic.

Thanks,

Jim