You went to your favourite restaurant.
You order for the drinks. Some chips. Appetizers. Finally your
much-awaited chicken comes to the table. It has no salt. You tell the
waiter that your chicken doesn’t have any salt. The waiter goes back
to the kitchen and tells the chef that you said that the dish had no
salt. The chef nods. He simply walks with the waiter and comes to the
table you are seated at. As he arrives, he bends down and whispers to
you, “Sir, there is no salt in the restaurant. The whole town has
run out of salt. We forgot to stock ours.”
It is the duty of a business to make
sure that it has all the ingredients required to run the way it is
intended to. No amount of reality or excuses is going to make up for
a shortcoming.
A business might have all the right
things in place, but even a single screw missing can displace the
whole order of the business.
There is a nature of flow for anything
around us. It is the same for a business. The role of a supply chain
is to manage the inflow and outflow of products and services from one
to another. It could be anything from parts, raw materials, and end
products.
Supply chains are responsible for the
strategic and tactical management of operations like forecasting,
capacity planning, cash flow management, inventory management,
sourcing and procurement, warehousing, transportation, customer
service, order processing, and ERP systems management.
The role of a supply chain is easier
than it might sound. Their success depends on the strong, consistent,
and sequential relationship a business maintains from within to the
external resources such as suppliers and other vendors.
A solid and tightly-knit inventory
management will enable a strong inventory management. This eliminates
overstock. It also controls understock predicaments.
A business cannot have excess goods. As
without appropriate demand the costs to maintain the overstock will
be an added expenditure.
On the other end, even having less
stock is dangerous. In this scenario, the business will be losing the
customer. The customer wants something he will go for it. He wants
the product. Not the seller. The seller is not important. The product
is. Understocking is a dangerous game. Not only will that be
garnering bad marks for showing a product as available on the website
and later will have to cut a sorry figure by mailing the customer to
say that the product has been sold out and that the customer has to
wait for a few weeks before the new stocks arrive, it is juts plain
and bottom line bad inventory management.
Integrated supply chains help manage
cash flow. Build PR without being direct. Supply chains are guardian
angels watching a business’ back.