An important step in the management of any for-profit organization is to gather and maintain customers. It is necessary knowledge that without customers, there is no profit instead of only costs and expenses. Each organization knows that this statement is true, and hence to maximize the return on investment (ROI)—because it is a costly process to create new customers than to sell to existing customers—the organization’s second-biggest imperative is to build stronger supply chain customer relationships.
Regardless of what any supply chain is architected to work, what every supply chain manager and executive needs is information that triggers actions which can result in building strong customer relationships. According to Richard Cushing, a demand-driven supply chain “result”ant, knowledge is a definite requirement that can lead towards building stronger customer relationships which can lead to effective constraint management.
According to a famous quote, it has been said that managing the constraints should be a priority or else the restrictions will be leading the organization. And when the obstacle start managing an organization, it will result in disastrous results with nearly constant and costly crisis accompanied by significant, recurring expenses related to expediting. Hence, this challenge needs to be controlled in the first go itself rather than being hit by the beast later on and affecting the organization.
Since it is impossible to eradicate variability in supply chain flows, it becomes essential to manage to minimize the effects of unpredictability across any organizational supply chain. However, according to experts’ observation that most supply chain managers and executives appear to be trapped in a perpetual cycle that is constant and only results in a downfall. As technology is being embraced across industries and changing the face of the global economy, replacing the present system will not be enough to fight this plague.
According to the opinion of experts who have all concluded similar scenarios that business enterprises and supply chain managers will not determine any pathways to meaningful or long-lasting competitive advantages by merely changing their existing systems. The vast majority of organizations are still depending on data coming from their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems for administration information. But, notwithstanding the make-up put on them by their purveyors, ERP systems are fundamentally focused on providing financial data and are incapable of providing detailed information required for effective supply chain management.
Obtaining responsiveness in supply chain customer relationships is the most crucial point. If supply chain managers today must support their companies and supply chains react to the imperatives of the fast-paced, global economy, then what they must be able to produce in their supply chains are responsiveness and flexibility or can be referred to as agility. Responsiveness in a supply chain seldom is achieved unilaterally.
Since, the part of the supply chain under an organization’s direct control—within the management’s proverbial “four walls”—is continually influenced by changes both upstream and downstream that includes both the suppliers and the customers, real responsiveness in any supply chain can only be created by building stable relationships with contented customers, happy suppliers, and commissioned employees.
Furthermore, flexibility or agility flows out of these relationships as supply chain managers and executives develop collaborative and unified environments that diminish variability in end-to-end processes and, thus, dramatically sever delays and excess files. The supply chains that are affecting today are the supply chains that have embraced new ways of thinking about how supply chains work—and disappointing to work, not just new technologies indicated to “stimulate” old, outdated traditions.
