Fuelled by internet, smartphones and advanced analytics; companies are looking to set global footprints across various countries at the same time. Businesses refraining from serving global customers are bound to lose in the marketplace competition. This calls for delivering the desired value to its customers irrespective of its location. The most important challenge faced by going global is to establish an efficient supply chain. Effective supply chain strategies coupled with a defined plan and right tools will facilitate companies in serving global customers. The following strategies might help managers establish a robust supply chain to meet changing needs.

Demand-driven Planning
The changing customer needs have made difficult for companies to plan their production activities. Traditionally, companies would increase the supply of products in the market and wait for demand to rise and sell their products. However, to meet changing customer needs, companies need the right prediction and risks model for planning their activities. With the help of real-time data analytics, real-time demand insights can drive companies to design pricing and marketing activities to move products faster and easier in the market. The aim is to leverage opportunities and mitigate business risks. With the cloud-based solution, managing inventory at multiple locations in real time can give businesses better insights on inventory turnover and have end-to-end visibility of products.

Agile Supply Chain
Adapt supply chains to suit changing market opportunities. Dynamic planning capabilities and improving operations will ensure high-responsiveness to changing demand. Kaizen or continuous improvement involves making the work environment more efficient through continuous innovations in the operations. Traditionally, changes in production and supply were implemented once a month or quarter based on historical sales.
However, today, there is a need for a dynamic supply chain to be capable to respond to market changes rapidly. With the Internet of Things and cloud technologies, it has become easier to achieve an agile and dynamic supply chain.

Aligning supply chain with business goals
With the aim of the supply chain is to support the sales process, the business objectives need to be aligned across the organization. However, it also has effects on finance, strategy and human resources. Establishing a business objective and converting the objective into relevant KPIs for every department would help integrate all activities of the company. For companies focusing on rapidly scaling up their sales, the supply chain needs to have the capability to handle large shipments and a large number of distributors and vendors.
This alignment helps companies find the right balance of supply and demand in line with business objectives.

Reliable Supply
The distributors always look for regular supplies from the manufacturer. In case of irregular supplies, distributors tend to hold large inventories and it might create shortfalls of supplies at the manufacturer to cater to the needs of other distributors. With VComply’s compliance management software, monitoring the KPIs would become easy as it would regularly monitor the third party services and internal controls so that distributors are assured of continuous supplies.

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