Monday, 23 March 2009 13:52 Written by Keith Shay 0 Comments

In these difficult economic times, it is more apparent than ever that money doesn’t grow on trees. At Ware-Pak, we are doing whatever we can to help our supply chain partners by saving money where we can. While this will not mean saving money at the expense of quality efficient service, there are things we can do to cut back on unnecessary costs within the supply chain. Below are “10 Smart Actions to Take in a Recession” that can be implemented to allow all parties in the supply chain to reap cost saving benefits.

1. Take cost out of your supply chain – Even the best supply chains can look for ways to reduce non-value add costs and be improved.
2. Stop analyzing “what was” and manage “what should be” – Focus resources on managing “what should be”. Know what costs should be before making a decision. Financial and physical limitations have changed and so should your strategy.
3. Get visibility to your physical and financial supply chain – The ability to track your products in transit along the physical chain can help reduce lead-time and inventory on hand. Visibility to the financial supply chain exposes ways to take cost out of your supply chain.
4. Replace inventory with visibility – Uncertainty in demand and other conditions can affect inventory on-hand, on-order and in transit. Seeing where your inventory is and where it will not be on time enables you to proactively manage risk.
5. Leverage a virtual information supply chain – The best information supply chains keep the physical and financial chains in sync with visibility. Having solutions ready when needed reduce the time and resources necessary for implementation. It also means little dependency on legacy systems and scarce resources.
6. Pay for Performance – Spend on solutions and services that don’t require upfront capital investment in extensive deployment time frames and expensive resources.
7. Reduce risk with positive proof of performance – Reduce overall risk by requiring proof of performance deliverables in days not months.
8. Ensure flexibility to scale up or down – Assess the ability to quickly scale up or down the range of scope of any solution. A successful strategy should support either without incurring additional capital and resources.
9. Make your supply chain faster, smarter and better – Make your supply chain faster by reducing lead times, smarter by using automation and intelligence, and better by reducing cost and carbon footprint.
10. Share the Savings – Cost savings across a supply chain require a win-win collaboration. Remember, supply chain partners must also survive the recession to reduce your risk.

[As seen in Supply & Demand Chain Executive, Dec/Jan ‘09]