Supply chain management benefits and optimisation | Infosys BPM (2024)

Supply Chain

Effective supply chain management is the backbone of the global economy as all procurement operations are dependent on global supply chains. As a result, despite the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, estimates indicate that the global supply chain market will likely grow to $37.41 billion with a CAGR of 11.2% by 2027. The pandemic has shown that an effectively managed and optimised supply chain is crucial for a business to survive. But what exactly is supply chain optimisation?

Definition of supply chain optimisation

In simple terms, supply chain optimisation can be understood as the integration of technological tools - such as artificial intelligence, the internet of things, or blockchain - into the supply chain to improve its quality, efficiency, and performance.* By optimising a supply chain, a business can ensure optimisation of costs, inventory, and networks across its supply chain, which spans over three phases of supply chain design, planning, and execution.

The benefits of supply chain optimization

A business optimised supply chain allows a business to be agile and responsive to the changing market conditions and consumer demands. This allows your business to ensure supply chain sustainability and stay competitive in the face of challenges. An optimised supply chain can work wonders for your business and offer a wide range of benefits for your business, including but not limited to:

• Improved quality control: Quality control is crucial for a supply chain to meet customers’ expectations and stay competitive. An optimised supply chain allows a business to implement end-to-end quality management, from procurement of raw materials to customer delivery. This level of control enables a business to reduce waste and manage KPIs for better business outcomes.
• Higher efficiency rate: Digitally optimised supply chains use real-time data and computing and analytics tools to offer real-time insights into every step of supply chain operations. This improves the flexibility and resilience of the supply chain while providing end-to-end transparency. Such visibility can also contribute to improved supplier performance, which, in turn, contributes to better quality control.
• Better flow of materials and information:Supply chain optimization strengthens the flow of materials and information across the supply chain - from raw materials and product processing to the final consumer. Such a quick flow of materials and information is critical in the contemporary business environment as customer expectations around timely delivery of a quality product are increasing.
• Lower overhead costs: Optimising the supply chain offers you control over expenses and helps eliminate unnecessary expenses in different operational areas. This can lead to lower overhead costs and overall cost reduction throughout the supply chain.
• Higher revenue and profitability: An optimised supply chain is better, faster, and more accurate. It can allow you to be agile and respond to any oncoming issues in real time, resulting in higher customer satisfaction and retention rates, which consequently means higher revenue and profitability.
• Improved supply chain collaboration: An optimally managed supply chain allows you to share real-time information with your trading partners, including suppliers, partners, and customers. This facilitates better collaboration for smarter decision-making, supply chain continuity, and risk mitigation across the supply chain.
• Integrated supply chain management: Digitally optimised supply chain allows your business to integrate different elements of supply chain management, such as sales forecasting, cash flow management, delivery and route planning, and risk management. With better access to data and control over supply chain operations, you can extract actionable insights from these elements and make well-informed decisions.
• Enhanced supply chain planning: Visibility and transparency throughout an optimised supply chain facilitates better planning of different elements within the supply chain. For example, insights drawn from the dynamics and performance of your supply chain allows you to better plan the locations of warehouses and distribution facilities to ensure timely and cost-effective delivery to customers.

How can Infosys BPM help?

Infosys BPM Digital Supply Chain Services helps your business achieve your target with the help of an agile and flexible supply chain. Transform and digitise your supply chain to integrate innovation, mitigate risks, and stay cost competitive to optimise your supply chain operations. With solutions such as supply chain diagnostics, SC shared services advisory, SC control tower, forecasting and inventory optimisation, you can not only improve the quality of your supply chain but build an optimised, agile, and responsive supply chain of the future.

*For organisations on the digital transformation journey, agility is key in responding to a rapidly changing technology and business landscape. Now more than ever, it is crucial to deliver and exceed on organisational expectations with a robust digital mindset backed by innovation. Enabling businesses to sense, learn, respond, and evolve like a living organism will be imperative for business excellence going forward. A comprehensive, yet modular suite of services is doing exactly that. Equipping organisations with intuitive decision-making automatically at scale, actionable insights based on real-time solutions, anytime/anywhere experience, and in-depth data visibility across functions leading to hyper-productivity, Live Enterprise is building connected organisations that are innovating collaboratively for the future.