Global Supply Chain Tensions
In today’s increasingly volatile world, supply chains must be able to adapt to changes over which they have no control – natural disasters, political instability, regulations, and dramatic economic changes.
Add to those trends such as a rapidly changing technological and digital landscape, increasing demand for quality and differentiation, and scarcity of resources, which may put supply chains under tremendous pressure to perform.
MBS is uniquely positioned to advise clients, bringing its category and transformation expertise to help clients achieve their specific organizational, supply management and process efficiency objectives.
Development to Execution – We’re With You
Unlike other supply chain consulting firms that often stop at recommending “high-level” supply chain strategies, MBS helps you implement and operationalize them for real-world success.
Our team of supply chain management experts starts with a comprehensive assessment of your supply chain, adjusts your business priorities, and then develops healthy supply chain strategies capable of rapidly adapting to changing business needs.
Supply chain consulting engagements at MBS are led by seasoned industry, process and subject matter experts, supported by world-class infrastructure, a rich knowledge base of supply chain best-practice methodologies, an extensive global leadership network and peerless category, commodity and supply chain market intelligence capabilities.
Resilient Winning Strategies for Supply Chains
Our timely supply market intelligence helps you identify and manage risks to be ready for market fluctuations, while our powerful, intelligent supply chain diagnostic tools and intuitive supply chain dashboards help you measure, optimize and report the impact of changes made to your supply chain processes.
With MBS, you will have quick access to a vast repository of practical insights, innovative strategies and supply chain management best practices — gained through our work with market-leading enterprise clients across industries and continents — to help you drive next-level performance and value from your supply chain.
Positioning: Positioning is the posturing of the overall organization to acquire and access the best possible goods, services, assets and energies from suppliers. It means becoming the best customer to a supplier in order to attain superior services, attract first innovation, and assure quality and supply flow. Positioning entails having the ability to influence and affect suppliers' actions, behaviors and investments for the organization's own benefit.
Management of Resources: Management of resources spans both the internal and external spectrums. Internally, the supply chain professional leads and manages how the organization produces goods and services for its customers and constituents. Externally, the supply professional collaborates with suppliers and influences product manufacturing, delivery of services, logistics performance and delivering value through effective process management. Supply chain professionals manage resources to ensure lowest overall cost, increase efficiency and transparency in processes, and shrink the asset base. Leading companies share their engineering, IT, logistics and other experts to help suppliers innovate and enhance processes, thus improving and lowering costs' levels and prices.
Related Capabilities: This final dimension, related capabilities, addresses approaches, personal strengths and organizational abilities that best combine tasks, skills, competencies and systems to meet any challenge or to identify and gain benefit from any first advantage. Classic examples include (a) strategic sourcing, (b) total costs, including total cost of ownership, (c) life-cycle costs, (d) scenario planning, and more recently (e) category and risk management and leadership. Broad capabilities reflect how effective supply professionals detect and flex approaches to tight, loose and shifting markets. They also reflect the ability to know and understand when it is best to apply primary buying power strength or gain advantage through collaboration. A capable supply professional is financially savvy and seeks performance results through a variety of mechanisms including lower price, total cost, working capital, speeded cash-to-cash cycles and reduced asset bases, among others. Building Supply Chain Management for your Organization Creating an expanded future for supply chain management requires two things: a vision and a roadmap. Characteristics of an effective supply organization include:
In these dynamic times, the global environment can bring more change and demands in a month than were experienced previously over a few years. The supply chain field and profession will continue to expand and grow in complexity and challenges. Supply chain professionals today must understand strategic elements of the business first and then competitively manage the business as an effective supply chain professional and leader. MBS field research reveals that the scope of supply chain management is an integration of at least across eighteen components;
Supply Management Components Definitions:
Disposition/Investment Recovery
Disposition is the act of moving goods out of one's internal organization to another organization due to loss of value, obsolescence, excess inventory or product change. Investment recovery refers to a systematic, centralized organizational effort to manage the surplus/obsolete equipment/material and scrap recovery/marketing/disposition activities in a manner that recovers as much of the original capital investment as possible.
Distribution
Distribution refers to: (1) Businesses established for the purpose of buying goods from manufacturers and reselling them to a general customer base. Distributors sell in smaller quantities than manufacturers, often with immediate delivery, and provide services that manufacturers are not willing to do. (2) Process by which commodities move to final customers, including return of goods. Activities include storing, transacting, packaging and shipping. (3) Relative arrangement of the elements of a statistical population based on distinctive characteristics.
Inventory Control
Inventory control is the management of inventories, including: decisions about which items to stock at each location; how much stock to keep on hand at various levels of operation; when to buy; how much to buy; controlling pilferage and damage; and managing shortages and back orders.
Logistics
Logistics is the process of planning, implementing and controlling the efficient, cost-effective flow and storage of raw materials, in-process inventory, finished goods and related information from point of origin to point of consumption for the purpose of conforming to customer requirements.
Manufacturing Supervision
Manufacturing is defined as planning, managing and performing the processing of materials into intermediate or final products, usually in large quantities.
Materials Management
Materials management is a managerial and organizational approach used to integrate the supply management functions in an organization. It involves the planning, acquisition, flow and distribution of production materials from the raw material state to the finished product state. Activities include procurement, inventory management, receiving, stores and warehousing, in-plant materials handling, production planning and control, traffic, and surplus and salvage. In spite of a slight difference in meaning, this term is often used interchangeably with supply management.
Packaging
Packaging is the container, wrapper or shipping box of a product. Packaging serves a number of functions, including containment, protection, apportionment, unitization, convenience and communication.
Procurement and Purchasing
Procurement is an organizational function that includes specifications development, value analysis, and supplier market research, negotiation, buying activities, contract administration, inventory control, traffic, receiving and stores. Purchasing refers to the major function of an organization that is responsible for acquisition of required materials, services and equipment.
Product and Service Development
Product and service development is a series of integrated processes in new product development chronicling steps from idea conception to commercialization.
Quality
Quality has been defined in a number of ways, including: synonymous with "innate excellence"; a precise and measurable variable that is inherently present in the characteristics of the product/service, defined by the user and therefore products and services have to have clusters of attributes which groups' of people (users) want; "right the first time"; conformance and efficiency; design and measured conformance with no waste, meaning lower costs; performance at an acceptable price; or conformance at an acceptable cost or conformance to specifications, satisfying or surpassing customer needs throughout the life of the product.
Receiving
Receiving is the business function that is responsible for verifying that the goods received are the goods that the organization ordered. This involves inspecting and accepting incoming shipments.
Strategic Sourcing
Strategic sourcing is the selection and management of suppliers with a focus on achieving the long term goals of a business.
Transportation/Traffic/Shipping
Transportation, traffic and shipping are terms describing the movement of goods and passengers over distances. Traffic is a materials management activity that controls buying, scheduling, auditing and billing of common and contract carriers.
Warehousing/Stores
Warehousing or physical distribution refers to a range of materials management activities that involves taking care of shipping, receiving, internal movement, and storage of raw materials and finished goods.
The MBS is a leading strategy and operations consulting company, with particular expertise in performance benchmarking and process transformation. Leveraging its prominent benchmarking and best practices database, we provide clients with fact-based advice that drives cost optimization and improved service quality across back-office functions including the finance, human resources, procurement, business, information technology and supply chain organizations. We offer expert offshoring and outsourcing consulting too. In finance, we can help you apply proven best practices to business cost management, and support your development of a finance strategy that aligns with corporate strategy and elevates the business value of the finance function. We also offer supply chain consulting that can help you form a forward-looking supply chain strategy and better manage supplier relationships and inventory.
We are simplifying it for you!