Many often associate on time delivery as one of the greatest supply chain challenges. There is much operational pressure in meeting contractual expectations of the customers. Many distributors of products have to ensure they are on top of their operational game or risk loosing enterprise accounts to the competition. Often on time delivery is connected to speed. Especially in industries handling perishable items such as food products including poultry, dairy products , fish, fruit and so on. Items such as sandwiches in supermarkets have really short life cycles of 12-24 hours. Therefore supply chain experts are tasked to overcome multiple challenges to ensure their operations are getting such products to final consumers safely within super short cycles. Such projects are referred to as batch production.
Other supply chains dealing with different commodities may have longer cycles but are still complex. This can include industrial equipment and machinery that have longer cycles but are complex in terms of bringing raw materials and parts together from different supplier located in different parts of the world. So although such cycles can be weeks and many months long they are reliant on different groups and stages are sequential. This is a heavily coordinated contract logistics project and can be referred to as unit production. Such coordination is imperative to ensure on time deliveries are completed , yes, you guessed it, on time! Many businesses operating in this space are focused on achieving supply chain resilience and are doing so by embracing digitalisation, technology allowing them to utilise supply chain visibility so they can see bottle necks where possible and make course corrections. Sounds simple in theory but is much more difficulty to achieve from a practical stand point in real the real world.
Qualified supply chain professionals with track records in either batch or unit production are worth their weight in gold and difficult to identify yet alone attract to a hiring companies business to reap the benefits of their skillsets. This results in making the best of a bad job in terms of market volatility , however will provide competitive advantages in terms of well coordinated operations and keeping those all important enterprise accounts in play while developing and progressing other customer accounts to enterprise status over time. How is the supply chain world treating you?
Comments