Digital Global Supply Chain Can Be a Strategic Advantage

Addison Group

Spreadsheets, emails, and paper documents are outdated and no longer an effective method for gaining control of today’s global supply chain. Astute CFOs are finding that those out-dated methods can only provide incremental improvements.

Many companies are ineffectively managing their global supply chains by using manual methods or outsourcing functions to third parties. These practices create black holes, loss of control and can increase costs.

Key to Success

Companies that fail to digitize their processes are missing out on vital performance boosting opportunities. Enacting a digital model of the global supply chain, allows companies to share, process, and analyze information much more efficiently. It also provides a reduction in costs and risks while enabling digital agility, which is the brass ring of supply chain success.

Digitization creates control and ownership while reducing the dependency on third-party providers. Unlike traditional methods of outsourcing or managing different systems, digitizing allows tasks to happen on a single platform. This improves the ability to align all operations with the business policies and the financial objectives.

A Strategic Competitive Advantage

Legacy tools can no longer effectively process the vast amounts of data involved in running today’s massive global supply chains.

To better manage a global supply chain, a company must seamlessly and automatically integrate data from both internal as well as external sources. Surveys show that fewer than 47% of respondents are using supply chain data to analyze the demand patterns and create a forecast using internal and external data. Meaning, there is room for strategic advantages.

Using a single platform makes it easier to share information and communicate with third parties by providing the ability to collect the answers all at once and reuse the answers throughout the entire process, providing for less redundancy and greater efficiency.

Automation provides a consistent standard and an efficient way for companies to safeguard against accidental violations. This also doubles as a way to reduce risk and protect the corporate brand.

Another benefit of going digital is that every transaction and event is captured and preserved within the platform. Making it easier to analyze the data and discover hidden issues.

Improve Your Bottom Line

Progressive CFOs recognize that making global supply chains digital benefits the company, its partners, and customers.

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