Charting your path to a customer-centric supply chain
June 16, 2021
On June 8, I was honored to participate in a presentation at SAPPHIRE NOW, SAP’s flagship conference. During the discussion, we addressed a fundamental question supply chain executives are grappling with today: How do I build a resilient, cost-efficient, customer-centric supply chain for my organization?
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There’s no doubt COVID-19 has reinforced the need for supply chain resiliency. But the pandemic also has illustrated that meeting customers’ new expectations for personalized products and services, and with a greater sense of responsibility and sustainability, requires a whole new digital architecture and way of working. Companies with a customer-centric supply chain use advanced digital technologies and rich data to identify and meet specific, unique customer needs, while optimizing costs and inventory so they can serve each customer or segment most cost-effectively.
As Accenture has continued to work closely with our ecosystem partners to help our clients build resilient, customer-centric supply chains, four important learnings have stood out:
- An end-to-end supply chain management solution provides unique benefits in creating a customer-centric supply chain. Clients using integrated supply chain solutions benefit from ease of use across solutions without having to juggle and manage multiple disparate solutions for each supply chain capability. The result is greater supply chain efficiency, visibility, responsiveness, and resilience, all of which are critical to meeting customers’ changing demands and expectations.
- Cloud significantly accelerates and simplifies the creation of a customer-centric supply chain. Cloud-based solutions speed time to value by decoupling supply chain solutions from the digital core implementation. Such solutions enable companies to ramp-up more quickly, and their intuitive user interfaces let companies capitalize on new customer opportunities by speeding the time to productivity—and the launch of new products. And their streamlined business processes help companies provide better customer service, identify upsell opportunities, and improve the order-to-cash cycle.
- Customer centricity and responsibility are intimately intertwined. More and more customers and stakeholders expect the companies they do business with to do good for society and the planet. Therefore, a critical component of a customer-centric supply chain is ensuring the supply chain bakes responsibility into its entire operations and supply base—something today’s leading cloud-based supply chain solutions make possible.
- A customer-centric supply chain makes companies a triple P&L threat. They can boost revenue by as much as 5%. They can reduce cost-of-goods-sold by 3 to 5% and SG&A by 15%. And they can substantially reduce their carbon emissions, energy use, and overall environmental footprint.
SAP has provided the digital core technology for many customer-centric supply chain transformations Accenture has undertaken with our clients.
One example is a global consumer products manufacturer, which found its supply chain heavily impacted by COVID-19. Demand by product family was fluctuating and unpredictable, leading to inventory exposure as demand outstripped or fell short of the available inventory in the supply chain. Processes were disrupted and visibility into capacity, plant performance, and inventory was obscured, making remedial action difficult. To get its supply chain back on track, the company asked Accenture and SAP to deploy Supply Chain Scenario Planning as-a-Service, a joint solution that uses SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP) and Accenture services. Supply Chain Scenario Planning as-a-Service provided a fast, pragmatic response to the company’s supply chain disruption so it could continue to meet customer demand. In exploring scenarios, the manufacturer was able address its shelf-life challenges and balance demand and supply to avoid inventory wastage. Early visibility of inventory exposure helped the company repurpose inventory, resulting in a 25 to 30% improvement in waste and increased operational efficiency of up to 50%.
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Early visibility of inventory exposure helped the company repurpose inventory, resulting in a 25 to 30% improvement in waste and increased operational efficiency of up to 50%.
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A pharmaceutical company faced a similar challenge. Wanting to ensure its global supply chain was delivering optimal outcomes for its customers, the company needed to improve its end-to-end supply chain visibility to better match supply to demand and ensure life-changing medicines didn’t go to waste on warehouse shelves. Using SAP technologies for the company’s new digital core, Accenture helped the company digitalize at scale by knitting together a complex set of solutions and platforms to transform end-to-end integrated supply chain planning and transportation processes. The result? The right medicines, in the right quantities are consistently delivered to where they’re needed most: to patients. The initiative has not only driven customer service levels to 99.5%, but is also poised to cut $1 billion in inventory by 2023.
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The initiative has not only driven customer service levels to 99.5%, but is also poised to cut $1 billion in inventory by 2023.
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I truly enjoyed being a part of this informative session and the opportunity to share some of the interesting work we’re doing with SAP to help companies become more customer centric and resilient. Click here if you’d like to register and watch a recording of the full session or here if you’d like more information on Accenture’s SAPPHIRE NOW 2021 sponsored tracks. And feel free to get in touch with me if you’d like to continue the conversation.
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