Rethink Your Supply Chain Strategy with Kyvos

The Covid-19 pandemic has tested and disrupted the supply chains globally. It goes without saying that the pandemic and multiple national lockdowns have tested the ingenuity, solidity, and flexibility of supply chain leaders worldwide. It was becoming challenging for supply chain leaders to keep factory lines moving as demands were evaporating in some categories and skyrocketed in others. Therefore, supply chain leaders started planning effective strategies to optimize the operations and keep the business afloat.

According to a survey conducted on senior supply chain executives from across industries and geographies, 93 percent of respondents were willing to make their supply chains far more flexible, agile, and resilient.

With the virus still a live threat, the previously unseen challenges in the supply chain are exposed and magnified. It made businesses realize their prior and current strategies are not working. They are in desperate need of repurposing and reshaping their supply chains for the present and the future. This will help supply chain leaders manage short-term crises, enable the business to serve their customers efficiently, and help economies rebound.

Challenges in Modern-Day Supply Chain Management

When businesses did the assessment of the disruption caused due to COVID-19 pandemic, they found fundamental changes in consumer behavior, routes to market, and supply chains. These changes have led to global supply chain management challenges that have knocked businesses off balance. Let’s look into these challenges:

Growing Costs

Cost control is one of the challenges faced by supply chain leaders. They are under constant pressure to maintain profit margins throughout the supply chain network. Major contributors affecting operating costs are rising fuel and freight costs, higher labor costs, increased commodity prices, and other regulatory requirements. The situation goes out of hand when supply chain leaders fail to identify areas that are not being fully utilized due to limited visibility. Therefore, to maximize the production output, businesses need to increase the efficiency of their systems by eliminating unnecessary and costly steps. They need increased visibility into all aspects of the supply chain to identify loopholes and make intelligent decisions based on accurate data.

Lack of Transparency

Lack of transparency inflicts considerable damage on the reputation of businesses. For example, sometimes shipments are held or returned from the ports due to unforeseen circumstances. This causes major cost disruptions that ripple through supply chains. Despite bearing so much cost, why are businesses unwilling to communicate upstream supply chain practices details to consumers?

Businesses and suppliers don’t divulge information about what’s happening upstream in the supply chain, thinking it might undermine their competitive advantage and harm their reputation. However, according to research, consumers may be willing to pay 2% to 10% more for products from companies that provide greater supply chain transparency.

Today, consumers seek more and more information regarding the product’s ingredients, how the product is manufactured, and the seller’s effort to improve working conditions. Consumers expect sellers to follow all the laws pertaining to transparency, such as policing of conflict minerals, food safety, forced labor, etc.

Material Shortages

Inability to identify consumer demand for the product, rapidly changing markets, poor planning and forecasting, revenue shortfall, and manufacturing disruption are some of the root causes for material shortages. These issues impact every supply chain business and can be considered the responsibility of supply chain leaders to follow up. No matter how many resources are working to mitigate its impact on customer deliveries, these issues may recur due to lack of visibility and collaboration needed to reduce material shortages.

Businesses could improve the visibility and collaboration needed by using predictive analytics to anticipate issues in advance. Powerful, real-time dashboards on massive volumes of data can help suppliers resolve these issues up to 65% faster.

Increased Supply Chain Complexity

Supply chain complexity is one of the significant concerns of supply chain leaders caused by a variety of factors such as:

Consumer expectations for faster lead times:

Today, consumers need lead times to be substantially shorter. They want same-day shipping for B2C or a quick turnaround for B2B. Businesses have no choice but to fulfill their consumer’s demands to maintain relationships and expand their footprint to reach new ones. Therefore, they start expanding markets by opening more outlets for faster handling and lead times. This adds complexity to supply chain management, as now they have numerous milestones to achieve and require investment into new facilities and partner relationships to service the expansion.

Expanded Products & Services:

A few years ago, the supply chains were very similar for a range of consumers. But now, the supply chain model is strained with expanded product lines, associated services offered, expanded geographic distribution, and various shipping options. Today, businesses need more agile and flexible strategies to adapt each customer order and ensure it arrives on time without exploding costs.

Making the supply chain less complex is never the answer. Instead, businesses must embrace the complexity and build a model with end-to-end visibility and collaboration while optimizing processes like inventory, order, logistics, and transportation management.

Role of Data in Supply Chain

Data is useless if it’s not analyzed and acted upon. The role of data is important in supply chain business to formulate strategies, streamline operations, improve transparency and make accurate decisions across the supply chain. Utilizing data to get insights can help improve supply chain activities, such as procurement, logistics, inventory, production, distribution, transportation, etc., through strategic planning and risk mitigation. Let’s see how –

Strategic Planning

Stock shortages, inability to fulfill unplanned demands, increased manufacturing costs, and shipping charges can damage your relationship with suppliers and harm your business reputation. Strategic planning can help achieve a flexible supply chain by standardizing procedures and lowering manufacturing costs. It empowers supply chain managers to plan for variability and respond tactically to changing conditions. With the help of supply chain analytics, managers can analyze historical customer behavior, market conditions, and projected versus actual sales. Using these insights, they can:

• Map transportation routes.
• Determine the location and size of warehouse space to accommodate materials and finished products.
• Accurately forecast demand for a product without having to store surpluses.
• Source and procure raw materials and other goods that go into making your product or service.
• Oversee inventory levels with supply chain partners to keep stock at an optimal level.

Supply chain planning can provide all the benefits mentioned above and much more, so it should no longer be considered as nice to have. Instead, it should be considered an essential step toward optimizing supply chains.

Risk Mitigation

Risk mitigation is a challenging task for any supply chain leader but analyzing data can help businesses manage known risks. There are two types of risks – Known risks and Unknown risks. Known risks can be identified by analyzing historical data and can be managed over time. On the other hand, unknown risks are difficult to predict and oversee. Here are some known risks that can be solved using supply chain analytics:

Escalating Costs

Using supply chain analytics, leaders can identify how much they have spent in the past and forecast how much they will need in the future. They can also determine critical cost commodities that exist in your product and can be hedged. This kind of knowledge can decrease costs by reducing days of supply, resolving excess inventory problems, and improving inventory planning. Besides this, supply plans, transportation, and other activities can be aligned with sales to reduce costs.

Inability to Prepare for Natural Disasters

Supply chain analytics helps in disaster planning by monitoring the weather conditions and running simulations across your supply chain to identify at which point a natural disaster would most likely impact your operations.

Inventory Risks

Inventory risks are the inability of a supplier to sell goods or the possibility of inventory stock decreasing its value in the market. Supply chain analytics can help leaders to determine demand relative to their current inventory stock levels. It can also help suppliers deliver stock on time and adhere to stock quality and quantities to maintain good consumer relationships.

Supply chain analytics can be the answer to managing and mitigating risks.

Transform Your End-to-End Supply Chain Operations with Kyvos

Today organizations use data to connect each component of the supply chain and identify opportunities to increase efficiency and lower costs. But with the ever-growing data volumes, it’s becoming difficult for their BI tools to analyze all this data and deliver timely insights. They need a solution that can provide deep analytics into every aspect of their supply chain.

Kyvos’ BI Acceleration is a one-stop solution for transforming and optimizing the supply chain through instant insights on massive volumes of data stored on the cloud platforms, cloud data warehouses and on-premise Hadoop data lakes. Let’s see how Kyvos can help you optimize end-to-end supply chain operations:

Early Identification of Problems

Using Kyvos, organizations can gain instant insights into vast amounts of granular data on their existing BI tools. With these insights, they can build analytical strategies to resolve issues and identify solutions.

Consolidated Reports

Kyvos’ unified semantic layer helps you to create a consistent data view so that users across the enterprise can:

• Create exhaustive dashboards, charts, time-series graphs, and more to summarize key metrics on sales, forecast, inventory, costs, and service levels
• Get a standard view of results across the board on all BI tools
• Create reports to evaluate and track forecast accuracy at multiple aggregation levels to identify exceptions and plan adjustments
• Evaluate supplier performance by creating graphs demonstrating key parameters such as PO lead time, fill rate, inventory dollars, cost recovery, and more

Insights in No Time

No matter how distributed your supply chains are across stores, geographies, and vendors, our proprietary Smart OLAP™ technology allows you to analyze trillions of rows of data with ease and speed. With Kyvos, you can:

• Slice and dice your data in almost any combination and get the results in seconds on your favorite BI tool.
• Analyze inventory data for millions of product SKUs across thousands of stores and distribution centers interactively.
• Evaluate the performance of thousands of suppliers on a month-to-month or year-to-year basis and use the insights to reduce inventory costs and improve forecast accuracy.

Improve Customer Satisfaction

The buying experience influences consumers more than buying a product or a service . An excellent product sometimes can’t make up for a late delivery disappointment. Therefore, the key to happy customers is closely tied to analyzing data gathered from multiple sources and conducting trend analysis to get insights into their behavior. Understanding their needs and preferences can help businesses drive a more consumer-centric strategy. With Kyvos, you can:

• Improve transparency between supplier and customer to make them feel informed about their purchases.
• Analyze buying patterns and evaluate future demands to optimize inventory and a higher order fulfillment rate while also optimizing inventory cost.

The rapid shift in market dynamics, escalating costs, and growing data volumes make businesses rethink their supply chain strategies. Supply chain leaders need a holistic solution that can provide self-service BI and interactive access to the available data . They want limitless BI scalability to build agile, responsive, and customer-centric supply chains on trillion-scale datasets. Kyvos brings all these benefits in a single platform empowering the users to access data in real-time without any scale limitations while delivering high-speed and consistent BI performance every time.

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