Supply Chain Management Software

SCM systems can greatly improve the visibility of your business processes and operations. It should help you to gain a 360-degree view of your company’s resources, employee productivity, and overall performance.

With a quality SCM solution, you can easily see your company’s resources and track the demand for those resources across all your distribution channels. It can also help you to manage inventory levels, forecast demand, and analyze sales.

This visibility can also facilitate how you strategize to move your business efforts forward across distribution channels and find the best delivery routes if needed. You can also use a good SCM solution to track and manage transportation and storage operations, pinpointing bottlenecks and optimizing for true customer success.

A good SCM software can assist in automating business processes. For example, if you offer repair or maintenance on a product or even refurbishment, you can use an SCM system to create an automated workflow for repair and maintenance orders. Once an order is received, it can go straight to the appropriate facility, where the team can start the work upon receiving the item.

This workflow reduces the manual effort required by customer service departments. As such, it’s possible to use this as an opportunity to create a better customer experience. When setting up automation, you can keep customers informed, such as when an order is received, when that order is getting shipped, or even the multistep processes for when an item needs to come in for repair.

Part of automation is also the ability to log and pull data when needed. Quality SCM solutions help with visibility into your operating costs, tracking and analyzing sales, and generating appropriate KPIs. With these tools, you can identify areas for improvement, celebrate successes, and plan for the future.

With a good SCM solution, you can easily create dashboards and compare metrics from different departments, such as logistics, operations, transportation, and others. You can also use an SCM solution to develop reports on product performance, inventory trends, and triage defects or delays.

An especially important aspect of analytics is clarity into your business costs. For example, you can use it to track and manage supplier expenses, carrier fees, and packaging costs. This way, you can easily manage the flow of funds across your supply chain.

Keeping your team happy and working efficiently is important to any business. Therefore, it’s important to understand that even the most advanced systems are a waste of time, money, and effort if your team can not operate them. Thus, SCM software must be user-friendly and easy to use so that teams can locate what they need, when they need it.

Programs should be trim and lean yet dense with resources and organized to be intuitive. Keeping in mind that many teams will have different uses for the software, it would be in the best interest of your business to ensure programs are accessible and can accommodate the needs of each team.