Operating a business in today’s digital economy is challenging. Customers want products and services they ordered quickly and personalized to meet their unique specifications. Organizations need to reimagine their business operations across the digital supply chain economy by following the basic principle below.
Customer-centricity: Plan and deliver for one particular segment.
Customer needs to form a vital part of the decision-making process in all profit-making organizations. Therefore, corporations need to create and foster relationships with existing and potential customers. Companies that value customers are experiencing the value of increased consumer loyalty through customer-centric. Being customer-centric takes a considerable amount of time, hence requiring patience and starting small. For corporations to succeed in a digitalized world, they should anticipate the consumer’s needs and then surprise them with the product or service. Creating a client-centric brand entails developing products, policies, processes, and a culture supporting customers throughout their product usage. Four practices will help an organization in implementing a client-centric program:
Employees for customer success– Employees face the workforce that determines the product quality and the customer’s experiences. Human resource management should focus on hiring quality talent to cherish customer experience and adopt customer thinking programs.
Value customer relationship– Viewing customers for who they are, people, rather than numbers to be analyzed during revenue performance report, will help the mutual relationship and breed customer loyalty.
Build a consumer database– Developing a customer database such as a CRM database can equip a corporation with information for a better customer understanding.
Build a company culture around customer outcome– This strategy will be motivated employees as they follow a customer-centricity approach when they connect their actions to results.
Predictive business: Design, make and maintain the product of one.
The business world is rapidly changing and growing in complexity, making product development a challenge. To keep pace, institutions must know what is about to happen before it happens. Predictive analytics used in product development can help organizations minimize the time the product arrives at the market by shortening the innovation cycle and improving quality at the expected cost. Using Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning, the predictive business design enhances the supply chain strategy by forecasting product success and failure, hence valuable to the decision-making process. The use of the Internet of Things (IoT) has been invaluable in producing new sources of real-time data on products. However, the challenge is using the technology to detect modeling correlations, failure patterns, and prescribing remedies for the failures. The information predictive design gathers can precisely contribute to future insight to help meet customer needs as they come into the market. Organizations can now use current and past data to determine consumer trends and behaviors and produce products that fit those trends. Issues affecting the companies’ operations are predicted and solved. Management can forecast machine breakdowns and corrective measures taken and ensure product adjustment to provide favorable weather conditions or avoid traffic.
Intelligent automation: Manufacture the lot size of one.
The digital supply chain entails the automation of the company processes such as manufacturing, responding to customers, equipment management, and managing people. Today we see intelligent automation in driverless forklifts used to move and lifts merchandise around the warehouse, use drones for product delivery, and automated vehicles for packages carriage. Intelligent automation can also improve supply chain digital transformation by focusing on mass customization rather than mass production. Technology enhances the manufacturing of individualized goods that fulfill client needs hence improving the sales volume. Manufacturers that are interested in automating operations and delivering the lot size one should embrace some key technologies:
3D printing: Popularly known as additive manufacturing, it helps to simplify mass customization. It aids manufacturers in generating demanded personalize goods by eliminating design constraints since consumers can change their product design at request.
Robotics: The introduction of robots to aid in the manufacturing process changed the dynamics of operations. Manufacturing companies can now skip steps that were essential in the past before automation. With a push of a button, designs that meet a client’s specifications are readily available due to robotics.
Machine Learning: Data collected are automated and can tell what is going on today and what will happen in the future. Machine learning enables institutions to harness past data to predict and avert possible system failures.
Total visibility: Analyze and manage the supply chain of one.
Total supply chain visibility in the digital economy requires real-time visibility on all activities across the entire supply chain. The goal is to monitor everything from the movement of raw materials, processing stage, manufacturing, packaging, and delivery. Total visibility would also mean the capacity to see all factors that could cause supply chain disruptions and affect sales, such as accidents, traffic jams, and weather patterns. Visibility during the supply chain involves more than just seeing each tier’s transaction and monitoring the demand triggers. Addressing the changes in demand across the chain faster will solve the inventory build-up problem through the chain. Real-time operational decisions can turn off or turn on the flow of material across the chain depending on the demand data relayed. Additionally, total visibility will embitter end-to-end stock control, leading to cost-effective and efficient operations. Attaining accountability and monitoring demand changes will prompt rapid response minimizing losses to help meet the organization’s bottom line.
Conclusion
Digital-economy requires businesses to adequately adapt to the market’s changing needs, focusing on how to utilize supply chain dynamics. The supply chain digital transformation can help the organization adopt valuable customer-centric, predictive business, intelligent automation, and total visibility. The goal of embracing supply chain digital transformation is to equip corporations with real-time data for quick and effective decision-making.
