Avoid These Top 5 Supply Chain Mistakes & Be Great

Are you a procurement or logistics professional suffering from supply chain mistakes?

Supply chain management involves a lot of missed opportunities and in the case of adding value, a lot of errors are realized and this will not only cost your time and money, but it will also cost the company’s resources.

Developing supply chain skills will prevent you from missing opportunities and you will optimize your productivity and career growth. The more these mistakes are corrected and avoided, the more the company will benefit.

Supply chain mistakes can easily be fixed once you get to the root of the problem and understand what needs to be done in the future to avoid them.

Here are 5 dangerous mistakes that can show up in your supply chain,

1. Ignoring Supply Chain Data

Data is the most valuable asset in every company whether it’s logistics, material cost, transactions, product testing data, pricing agreements, or tacit data (email communications between teams).

It is essential to examine the kind of data used for better decision-making as this will help the company to develop the appropriate strategies to capture, store and analyze data. Without reliable data, it will be harder to avoid other mistakes as well.

2. Ineffective Cost Reduction

Most companies struggle to reduce and once all the easy cost reduction has been gained, it can be difficult to reduce costs even further.

To reduce costs in supply chain management, it is important to reduce how many times the products are ‘touched’ or handled between being received from the supplier or factory and eventually delivered to the customer. Every time a product is touched, equipment costs, damage costs, labor costs are incurred. 

3. Not Planning for The Future

It is important to have a plan in place to deal with disruptions to the supply chain so that in case something happens in the supply chain, you’ll be able to deal with it quickly and minimize a lot of problems. Align the design of your supply chain with that of the company.

Enhancing your supply chain skills will help you analyze the company’s current needs and craft supply chain management that will prepare the company to adapt to unexpected changes and grow the company’s needs.

4. Lack of Optimized Business Processes

To optimize supply chain management, then involve teams in managing the supply chain management as it is an easier way of achieving common goals. You should also involve supply chain transparency and end-to-end supply chain visibility which eases accurate data collection, maximum efficiency, and risk management.

5. Poor Customer Service

Vendors and customers are key to a company’s success and the better your relationships with them, the better your supply chain management will be. Without effective relationships on both ends of your supply chain, then the whole process may fail. Understanding customers’ needs is a key aspect of effective supply chain management. You can evaluate supply performance on customer service which will improve supply chain management.

To Wrap-Up

These mistakes are common due to oversights and systemic faults in your supply chain. Diagnosing these mistakes can be difficult, but if you pay attention to the red flags, then you will understand missed opportunities in your day-to-day common practices. However, if you fix them or avoid them, you can expect significant growth.

Have you encountered such mistakes and don’t know how to avoid them?

Get to understand how to fix those mistakes by enrolling in the Supply Chain Management Certificate Course where you will learn how to effectively and efficiently manage the activities of the supply chain and be multi-skilled in supply chain management.