Arun Krishnamoorthy, CMO, Techpanion, is currently responsible for looking after the marketing & operations of the automation & SaaS Company Techpanion. His main arena of work involves spearheading business expansion and sales and marketing. His distinguished skillset includes a remarkable experience of over 15 years in consulting, analytics, business modelling, and implementing strategic initiatives. The techno-commercial professional holds a Postgraduate degree in Business Administration, New Delhi & ECM master from AIIM, London. He has previously worked successfully in prominent operations, finance, and marketing domains before starting his venture, Techpanion, and leveraging his expertise.

The logistics segment is an ever-evolving market. Transportation and a robust supply chain model are the key components of this sector. While the pandemic severely impacted the sector, it was prompt enough to recover and grow. However, the coronavirus also paved the way for the digital revolution of the logistics segment.

Ever since then tech adoption has been on a rise. It no longer remains an option but has emerged to be the dire need of the hour for the businesses. Treading on the path of digitization has not only enabled business continuity but has also given them a competitive edge in the market and led to the strengthening of the supplier network.

Ensuring business continuity

To ensure business continuity during the crisis, it is essential that organizations acquire attributes of resilience, agility, and collaboration.

Resilience

The resilience of the supply chain model is solely procurement responsibility. This implies finding the right suppliers that would associate with the firms as partners and would help strike a balance between quality and cost.

As digital adoption is surging and the procurement sector is ever-evolving; organizations need to keep abreast with the upcoming trends and innovations in the market. Doing so will help them explore the relevant opportunities to recover and grow.

Agility

The conventional strategic sourcing process is time-consuming. At times, it might even take several months to be implemented. However, owing to the present unstable times, the procurement process needs to be quick and proactive so that businesses have access to the material as per their need and convenience.

Collaboration

Cohesive working and streamlining internal operations is a major step in ensuring business continuity. This step deals with harnessing the supplier’s knowledge and focuses on using VMI or changing orders, etc.

What often goes unnoticed is the fact that now is the time for businesses to shift their focus on introducing innovative concepts such as collaboration and agility as this will eventually pave the way for better resilience.

Building a robust supplier network

To ensure seamless operations and a robust supplier network; trusted supplier communication, supplier diversity, and discovery systems are important factors.

Supplier relationship and communication

For businesses, a highly streamlined supplier relationship is a must. The very core of this connection is streamlined supplier communication. In the absence of the same, the chances of missing the deadlines and targets, incorrect shipping, payment delays increase significantly. Effective supplier communication can be established by setting a clear reporting plan including deadlines and expectations, ensuring to leave no doubts or ambiguity when starting out, and communicating how frequently you’d like to receive the critical metrics related to delivery.

While handling this manually isn’t possible, switching to an automation tool is important. It is manageable and measurable and would take care of all the processes to ensure effective supplier communication is important. Such tools lead to increased visibility, automate reviewing and approval process as well as ensure seamless change management.

The reason to ensure a seamless supplier relationship is simple- high vendor satisfaction levels would lead to the business’ success. The more the gaps exist in the communication, the higher will be chaos in the organization!

Supplier Diversity

In order to ensure the supplier ecosystem is robust and balanced, supplier diversity plays a major role. This process encompasses the organization’s efforts in including diverse categories of suppliers in its sourcing process and active supply base. This concept promotes innovation and the introduction of new products in the organization. It also provides a plethora of opportunities for businesses to expand. This approach further increases the competition leading to better prices and service levels. It enables the organizations to serve the emerging and untapped markets as well. Adding to it, the government’s ‘Vocal for Local’ campaign also empowers the concept of supplier diversity and encourages firms to collaborate with local suppliers owned by diverse segments of the population.

Supplier Discovery

Supplier Discovery is another process that enhances the supply chain efficiencies. It refers to organizations looking for a supplier that meets the company’s regulatory and project requirements. Usually, companies resort to traditional methods of supplier registry or external networks for supplier selection. This is indeed a time-consuming and painstaking task. Hence, a viable solution is to incorporate supplier discovery systems. Using the power of technology, these systems create a centralized repository of all the supplier-related information.

Adopting this path helps companies to track the best suppliers based on the project parameters. This process also renders a helping hand in enhancing the supply chain efficiency. It increases the company’s sourcing leverage as well as promotes supplier diversity. It also facilitates the on-demand search of suppliers and helps organizations reach the global supply chain. Supplier Discovery systems are now critical for businesses as they support innovation and give the companies a competitive edge in the market.

Summing up!

Ensuring business continuity requires organizations to be resilient and agile as well as foster collaborative working. In order to build a robust supplier network, businesses need to keep abreast with the industry trends and be prompt enough to introduce innovations. Along with this, incorporating tech solutions is essential to ensure effective supplier communication, sourcing discovery as well as supplier diversity. In this digital-driven era, technology has emerged to be the dire need of the hour. Leveraging the power of automation solutions, businesses have been able to effectively sail through the challenges, ensure continuance of operations as well as develop a strong supplier ecosystem!