Car manufacturers rolling ventilators off the line. Breweries pumping out hand sanitizer. Laundry and uniform businesses outfitting healthcare workers with PPE. If there’s anything I’ve learned tracking companies through their COVID-19 pivots, it’s this: success means being agile.
Year: 2020
Should Manufacturers Consider Coming Home or Stay Offshore?
It seems strange in August 2020 that only six months ago we accepted that many of our components should come from Asia. How times have changed! The thought of relying on one supplier in a far-away country now keeps many supply chain managers up at night. The primary consideration for procurement departments is no longer around cost but around reliability and availability. For manufacturers, the only way it seems possible to resolve these issues is by bringing suppliers back onshore – suppliers within the same region or country.
6 Challenges Facing Procurement and How to Address Them
The effects of the Coronavirus pandemic are far from over and a recovery timeframe is anything but certain. Among the strategies that businesses are adopting during this time in order to keep costs in check and reduce the size of layoffs, is to focus on procurement to maintain ongoing supplies of materials and components, and to reduce the risk of unanticipated costs. Procurement is no longer the department that gets discounts and places orders, it now has increased strategic value.
Customer Queries Hit an All-time High during Covid-19
When lockdown began, business and service provider customer support teams anticipated query loads would lessen, as businesses closed or operated at reduced capacity. However, customer queries hit an all-time high during Covid-19. With teams Working From Home (WFH) during lockdown, IT and admin resources were not as readily available as at the office. Though reachable via digital tools, if support was delayed or lacking for any reason, the end-user logged a query with their support partner, like SYSPRO. If you are still experiencing an influx of customer queries, consider these recommendations to better streamline the process:
How Procurement can Improve Inventory Management
One thing that procurement departments are working intensively on at the moment is how to spend more effectively. That doesn’t mean just cost-cutting, but where to prioritize spending. Given that direct and indirect materials makeup at least 50% of the typical manufacturer’s costs, what procurement can do to improve inventory management is an obvious place to start.
Venture Bravely into the New Normal with Digital Readiness as Your Shield
Fortune favors the brave. Over the last few months, businesses have needed to venture bravely into a ‘new normal’. While this transition has been more natural for the companies who already had a strong digital strategy in place, it has been a challenge for those in the earlier stages of digital transformation.
The Smart Factory: The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing and Distribution
It’s been around for decades but only in recent years has artificial intelligence (AI) emerged from the research labs into the real world. Interestingly, consumers are more familiar with it, in the form of Apple’s Siri, the Amazon’s Alexa, and navigation apps like Waze – so when will businesses, and especially manufacturers and distributors, get around to accepting AI as a standard part of business lives?
Digital Readiness: How Businesses are Responding to the “New Normal”
Reading Time: 7 minutes If the past few months have shown us anything, it’s that businesses everywhere are at different stages of digital readiness. We have all had to venture bravely into a “new normal”and adjust to a new, more remote, world of work, and daily life. While this transition has been more natural for the companies who already … Read more
Supply Chain Disruption – What Happens Next?
Organizations are looking for opportunities to innovate their operations and rethink their business models as the Covid-19 pandemic has caused not only a global humanitarian crisis but a supply chain crisis as well.
The World Economic Forum says the magnitude of this unprecedented crisis has yet to be fully realized or manifested. Some of the impacts on manufacturers and businesses around the globe include supply shortages, increased prices, fulfillment delays, and reputational damage to brands.
