A survey was conducted among procurement professionals in the LinkedIn group for Procurement Professionals. The objective of the survey was to assess how companies are managing their communication in procurement and the role of Supplier Network portal and Mobile applications in supply chain.
The results are below
1. Do You have critical items being sourced from outside vendors ?
Yes – 90% No – 10%
2. Do your suppliers always acknowledge your PO in time and give delivery estimates ?
Yes – 20% No & Not always – 80%
3. Do you always depend on your buyers to know the current status of orders ?
Yes – 60% No – 40%
4. Do you get Advance Shipment Notification (ASN) from your suppliers ?
Yes – 75% No – 25%
5. Do you have third party managed inventory ?
Yes – 17% No – 83%
6. How frequently do you get inventory shortage issues ?
Every week – 30% Every month – 24% Rarely – 46%
7. Do you do supplier performance measurement and communicate to them ?
Yes – 60% No – 40%
8. Do you think providing a self service portal to your suppliers will improve the reliability of the deliveries ?
Yes & Maybe – 88% No – 12%
9. Do you think Mobile applications will help improve the overall supply chain ?
Yes & Maybe – 96% No – 4%
10. Do you think your organization will benefit from a Cloud based supply chain solution ?
Yes & Maybe – 94% No – 6%
Analysis of the Results:
Supply chain is becoming critical as 90% of respondents say their company is procuring critical items from outside. This is becoming more and more becoming predominant as outsourcing of key activities are pushed downstream and upstream value partners. Any breakage in supply chain links will cause turmoil as critical components are being sourced from outside. Hence close monitoring of these procurement activities becomes very important.
80% of the respondents said that most of the time, suppliers do not acknowledge the PO and provide accurate delivery estimates. This adds to the risk in the supply chain. When suppliers are not confirming the firm delivery dates and standby their commitments, it becomes a potential failure point in the supply chain.
60% of the respondents have mentioned that their organization always depend on the buyers to know the current status of deliveries. This shows the lack of a central system where everyone in the organization can check the current status of their orders. There could me many downstream activities that depend upon the arrival of the material in time. Hence it is important that a central system (either ERP or a Supply Chain system) is always updated and current in status and dependencies on individual buyers is reduced.
54% of the respondents have mentioned they run into inventory shortage scenarios at least once every month. This shows there is lot of room for overall improvement in their supply chains.
95% of the respondents have mentioned that providing a self service portal and cloud based supply chain solution will help them to perform their roles better
95% of the respondents have indicated that mobile applications in the area of inventory visibility will help to improve the inventory management.
Overall the survey indicates that the industry is moving towards collaboration, timely feedback from suppliers and the role of collaborative systems to improve their supply chain.
TPSynergy.com (www.tpsynergy.com) provides the cloud based supply chain and supplier network solution that has most of the features mentioned above. It can be concluded that Organizations should try such solution to keep current on the technology trends in their Supply Chain.
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