Managing stock supply chain effectively is important as your organisation relies on the supply chain to meet demands. If your business grows too quickly the supply chain or logistics roles will creak and let customers down creating havoc operationally. When the stock supply chain is optimised you can expect growth with the ability to meet demand and ensure that customers’ expectations are met or excelled. Being able to automate the management of this function using reliable software is a great opportunity to streamline and gain a competitive advantage.
Here are our top 7 tips and considerations when selecting an accounting, business software, or ERP solution and partner, for your stock supply chain business.
Tip 1 – Collaborative Working
Work collaboratively with your supplies and vendors. They are affected by the same factors that affect your business so working with them means you can try to alleviate interruptions and build on success together. This is where your business solution can be used to anticipate, manage and react to your stock supply chain requirements quickly. This is useful for demand planning to improve the effectiveness of your supply chain to ensure your suppliers will have notice to meet demand and using the software data with alerts means that you can communicate to suppliers quickly and effectively.
Additionally, the collaboration needs to extend to your internal teams. The right software will help to provide one data pool that is easy to use and should save time. Look out for solutions that are easy to manipulate and work the way that you do.
Tip 2 – A solution to fit your specific needs
One of the best options for stock supply chain management software is to choose one specific for your product or your industry or has the ability to work for your specific industry. Ensuring that your stock supply chain software is customisable for your business needs is crucial, for example, size, shape, colour for furniture or fashion retailers or for perishable goods, critical time frames that need to be considered. Using a central solution and integrating that solution is a success factor.
Tip 3 – Opportunity for Agility
A key requirement of accounting, business software, or ERP solutions for your supply chain is to ensure that custom modules can be added, or that you can work with consultants to assist you to ensure that the software is optimised to fit your business. This is important for stock supply chain to maximise the opportunity to respond quickly to the supply chain management needs.
Tip 4 – Alerts and Data Insights
The software must have the ability to track stock, shipments, and sales to provide alerts on potential issues across the supply chain process with automation on forecasting and stock ordering. It shouldn’t matter how many separate warehouses your distributors or your company is working across the shipment and stock tracking should be seamless.
Tip 5 – Change Management
When considering an upgrade or new implementation of software for stock supply chain, ensure change management is considered. Time internally will be required to ensure that all requirements are captured and delivered and that end users are sufficiently trained. Additionally, working with the right ERP partner to develop the system to your exacting needs is crucial. This will help to implement a successful stock supply chain system to your organisation. Indeed, Gartner confirms that “embedding efficiency in organisation values and management practices… delivers competitive advantage by cost optimisation of supply chain strategy.” Embedding your business values in change management is a great way to bring the technology to life and drive the goals your business has set.
Tip 6 – Keep collaborating
Once you have your solution working remember to keep a steering group meeting at least once a quarter. Just because the solution was optimised for your business when it went live doesn’t mean that’s it. Ensure that you are listening to your people and driving updates and retaining that optimisation bringing your people, process, and technology together. Ensure that a lead is assigned to set targets and report the progress.
Tip 7 – Budgeting
According to Gartner, “mature organisations will prepare for disruption by having 3 budgets prepared – best case, worst case, and most likely case.” This is because when faced with disruption like the Covid 19 pandemic many supply chain businesses will stop spending, reduce the staffing costs and cut capital investment. Having 3 budgets prepared means that you are agile and ready to move and respond to the supply chain needs as the market shrinks and expands. Justifying investment with a focus on how they will improve your supply chain outcomes is important to get a buy in for spend.
Conclusion
Any business looking to grow will have to pay attention to its stock supply chain to ensure it can keep up with the demand and align business value with efficient stock supply chain outcomes.
Founded in 1997, Synergy Technology is a leading ERP software company, Microsoft Gold-certified Partner, and Pegasus Strategic Partner. We work with manufacturing and distribution companies to streamline their accounting, ERP, and business solutions software.
