DISRUPTION-BUSTING MOVES FOR 2023 AND BEYOND
PUT THE CUSTOMER AT THE CENTER OF YOUR SUPPLY CHAIN STRATEGY The most important part of developing a customer-centric strategy is to start with the end customer’s perspective. By working directly with your customers to understand what makes them successful and what may be holding them back, you can determine how to adjust your overall strategy to enable your organization to be successful. How do your customers operate when something goes wrong? What are they looking for when there’s an issue? When you understand your customer’s internal processes, you can then work alongside them to ensure top priorities are the same. At Parts Town, we are technology driven with a customer service obsession–we bring together all of our qualities and capabilities through collaboration with suppliers, manufacturers, and customers. By working closely with our partners, we can ensure we have a strong, innovative algorithm, accurate inventory planning and purchasing processes, and that we can ship to our customers with quality and reliability. Through our technology and digital innovations, we put the power in our customers’ hands to nd and track what they need quickly, interact with our team members, and gain full transparency across the supply chain. By implementing new, innovative solutions, from our distribution center to our mobile app, we have enabled our customers to nd, research, and further understand what they need quickly and ef ciently while optimizing our team members’ time and resources. By developing a customer-centric culture and strategy from the outside in, organizations can develop a supply chain strategy that is successful but also open to changes in the industry. Investments in technology are great, but the relationships we build in the industry are key to success. You can never collaborate enough with your suppliers and customers, and by focusing and building on those relationships, you enable your organization to be more successful in the long run. My advice to suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and so on is to collaborate with each other throughout this industry. Now is the time to lean on and learn from each other, and invest in tools to enable collaboration.
IMPROVED FORECAST
TAKE COVER WITH RETAIL CONSOLIDATION Understanding the cost advantages of a 3PL’s consolidation solutions should be a top priority for CPG suppliers. Through a retail consolidation model, suppliers leverage economies of scale by sharing truckloads with other customers to create a single, full truckload to the same retailer distribution center. This allows shippers to eliminate redundancies, drive higher in-stock levels, and save more than 30% on total transportation costs by leveraging a shared supply chain network. Simply put, a consolidation strategy enables a more cost ef cient, exible supply chain by getting products to shelves faster, while sending fewer trucks out on the road. Investments made in supply chain technology will pay o immensely in 2023. Following all the disruptions over the past two years, shippers are now much better equipped with data-driven technology to see, act, mitigate, and sometimes predict supply chain disruptions. Disruptions have always existed, but the eects of those disruptions were often unmeasurable. Now most disruptions are not only relayed in real-time for tactical decisions, but supply chain managers can measure the eects of them in aggregate and make longer-term strategic decisions—saving on the bottom line and making customers happy. –Josh Brazil, VP of Supply Chain Insights, project44
–Rony Kordahi Chief Operating Ocer Parts Town
–Kevin Williamson CEO RJW Logistics Group
160 Inbound Logistics • January 2023
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