However, we also appreciate that companies want to act quickly. Taking time out for supply chain modeling, stress testing, and analytics may be a hard sell for business managers when your customers are looking for their deliveries or large trading partners are unhappy with your performance.
Over decades of working with manufacturing and distribution companies, Sikich has made an art of helping businesses gain visibility and introduce productive changes in a predictable, results-driven manner. It’s usually just a matter of weeks to assess business processes and propose adjustments in preparation for implementing supply chain management software. In deployment projects, we follow a proven approach that provides pre-built processes ready to go into production.
The solutions we frequently implement, like Microsoft Dynamics 365, typically live in the cloud, where scaling and reconfiguring them to meet changing needs can be accomplished quickly. In addition to supply chain, finance, and other business management capabilities, Dynamics 365 also has a customer relationship management (CRM) component. It’s not limited to customers, however—you can use it to track and manage vendors, too. You can keep vendor commitments and communications at hand, record vendor quality assessments, and store information about vendors’ operations and organizational changes. You can draw on that vendor data when you evaluate the risks associated with your trading partners, and you can correlate it with the financials in Dynamics 365 to see how well vendor relationships serve your business.
Many of the steps involved in ensuring supply chain visibility are relatively uncomplicated. For instance, siloed data get in the way of transparency in many companies. There are only so many commonly used data sources, and Sikich can often make use of standardized integrations or perform easily configured data migrations to connect them or bring all data into one repository. And, depending on your goals and priorities, there are many efficient ways to build dashboards and reports for executives and other key business roles to show you what supply chain performance looks like.