In the rush to overcome the challenges of the past few years, organizations and their teams were forced to get creative quickly in order to survive. While this kept supply chains moving, many picked up a few bad habits along the way.
It’s vital that organizations like yours don’t fall back into those old habits — habits that can leave you unprepared for the future, and slow your operations today.
Even with uncertainty looming on the horizon in 2024, there’s an incredible opportunity for businesses to leapfrog their competitors— if they can avoid falling back into old habits that allow for inaccuracies and waste.
If manufacturers can avoid complacency and harness the energy that drove historical supply chain progress, they’ll be positioned for exponential growth and success in the future.
Read on to learn five bad habits that might be holding your company back, and the changes that must be made to improve decision-making, communication, and efficiency across your teams in 2024.
Even within the manufacturing sector, which has been a pioneer in implementing automation in production, certain aspects of their operations continue to lag behind in fully embracing supply chain automation solutions. As labor concerns, fluctuations in freight costs, and unpredictable demand surges start to stabilize, some manufacturers might deprioritize the technology initiatives that were once deemed mission-critical during periods of peak demand. However, this would be a costly oversight.
AI-powered supply chain technologies synthesize vast amounts of data on real-time and historical supply chain performance to predict outcomes. Depending on the application, the AI calculations could include data from thousands of supply chain networks for unparalleled prediction accuracy. Some valuable AI-insights that can streamline manual work, prioritize risks and improve performance include: estimated shipment arrival times, chance of delivery failure, stockout risk, time to complete tasks and more.
Advancements in artificial intelligence are creating new opportunities for employees in any function to augment their job with software and systems that aid smarter and faster decision-making – on the front lines.
With the right information and tools at their fingertips, employees are able to eliminate waste through proactive planning. For example, billions of dollars are wasted annually by companies who struggle to prioritize what to do with carrier capacity in their facilities. Drivers spend approximately four hours per day waiting in queues, reducing their drive time by 40%[1], contributing to higher detention charges, and requiring a larger core of capacity to complete the same amount of work. These nuanced decisions require a full view of supply chain data.
Check out 5 ways visibility technology can deliver ROI for manufacturers here
The workforce of 2019 was very different from that of today. In a Gartner survey[2], 77% of respondents said the events of the last few years changed their expectations of their employer. Few workers want to do mundane tasks, like walking a factory floor and checking off items on a clipboard or calling carriers to reschedule appointment times. In fact, in a recent survey[3] published by Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute, technology was ranked the #3 most important factor in job satisfaction by manufacturing employees — only physical wellbeing and flexibility in when/where they work ranked higher.
Along with this, older systems don’t do much to curate the alerts it delivers to their users. Without context from other operating systems, older solutions push every exception – regardless of its impact – to responsible teams, who then have to figure out how pressing it truly is. Newer capabilities can help not only proactively find issues within a supply chain, but quantify its potential impact to allow users to be more selective on how they choose their next move.
Learn from 5 experts, including CNBC’s Lori Ann LaRocco, in this recap of one of the most popular sessions of FourKites’ Visibility 2023 user conference.
Today’s business environment operates at breakneck speeds, and siloed information can be a barrier to your team’s ability to cooperate and coordinate. Waiting for answers from other departments, waiting for reports to refresh, or waiting for analysis to be validated all take time away from your teams. The ability to transform supply chain data into actionable insights that are available to the right people at the right time is critical to success.
Being able to combine ERP, WMS, TMS, OMS, and more into a single platform view keeps data current, relevant, and reliable – meaning the data your sales team relies on is the same data your logistics team is acting on.
By creating a layer between your systems and your operating teams, you can aggregate, standardize, and contextualize the same exact data into persona-specific information.
of manufacturing decision makers still don’t believe they have access to the right information and insights to make informed decisions[4]
of companies indicated that connecting data from different sources was a significant priority for 2024 in a recent survey[5]
of companies use an astonishing 10 or more systems to manage their supply chain according to a recent survey[5]
Click each icon to learn the five roles in your organization who should be using real-time visibility data.
Track & Trace
Identify loads at risk with ML-based Dynamic ETAs and understand root cause and customer impact.
Customer Service
Identify orders at risk, understand customer impact, and drill down into root cause to proactively communicate to customers.
Transport Planner
Optimize the transportation plan for each order to maintain OTIF compliance. Gain powerful analytics across carriers, lanes & regions.
Site Manager
Prioritize unloading trailers and containers based on the products inside, according to need for fulfillment or shortages at the site.
Inventory/Materials Planner
Gain holistic view of inventory across sites and in-transit. Understand inventory levels and the impact on product availability downstream.
Leading organizations are transitioning the supply chain from a cost to a profit lever. Some are even using their supply chain as a service. This can only be accomplished by making your supply chain data available to those who need it with context on your end-to-end operations. Without great visibility in your supply chain at an order and SKU level, it’s nearly impossible to make decisions that have a material impact on your bottom line.
Not everybody within your stakeholder group consumes your supply chain in the same way. While logistics managers may benefit from shipment-level views, odds are that order-level visibility is a necessary component of how customer-facing groups manage their day-to-day. Keying in on a specific order with context-rich insights to any risk factors can help your frontline workers be proactive with customers with the information they value.
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You might also be thinking about how important that real-world information is and how your business might want to include it when it performs its planning. Are you using a low-cost production facility that actually leads to more penalties? Are you understaffed at a facility with the highest detention fees? Being able to ingest supply chain data into your own business intelligence data allows you to contextualize every decision you make with the latest information.
Be proactive about supplier and carrier evaluations with scorecarding. With a single source of truth for your supply chain data, you can involve stakeholders from across the business. Proper scorecarding allows you to be confident in your decisions and gives you the data you need to negotiate based on performance against SLAs.
According to Deloitte’s 2022 report, “Meeting the challenge of supply chain disruption,”[5] the most common risk-mitigation tactic being employed in supply chains today is strengthening existing relationships with current suppliers.
Manufacturers can further optimize their networks — suppliers, carriers, lanes and ports— by looking at areas of poor performance, identifying risks or diagnosing root causes, and making changes with real, tangible data.
FourKites has improved our carrier scorecarding process.
That was a very manual, time consuming creation process, and now we can not only create it faster, but by having the extra milestones, we’re really able to zoom in on what was the true root cause of a shipment delay.
– Kim Segal, Director of Global Transportation at Zebra Technologies
Measuring your emissions baseline and tracking progress against your sustainability goals is essential for success. FourKites offers clear visibility into the actual miles traveled for your shipments, which is key to the calculation process. Platforms like FourKites can provide a better understanding of emissions output, which can then help in the measurement process, one that is ongoing as organizations move closer to global goals.
Approximately how many pounds of carbon dioxide are emitted into the atmosphere per gallon of diesel burned?
Sorry, although it’s very optimistic of you, it’s not correct. Have another go.
Not quite; have another go.
For every 1 gallon of diesel burned a whopping 22 pounds of CO2 are emitted into the atmosphere.
One more guess and you'll nail it I'm sure!
This is the moment to improve transparency.
The growing pressure of constrained energy supplies is making green initiatives more relevant to the long-term health of the manufacturing industry and global economy. Manufacturers must run their business with data-driven insights on the sustainability of their supply chain operations…
– Avijit Dhar, Advisory Consultant, IBM
The industry standard has become on-time in-full (OTIF), but is that all your customers are looking for? In fact, in a recent FourKites survey, Improving Customer Experience was tied for the top supply chain challenge facing manufacturers. Meaning that servicing table stakes demands, like OTIF, isn’t going to cut it when tough decisions are made.
Improving the customer experience means more than delivering products on-time. Providing consumer-grade transparency to shipments in-transit helps create a more human-centric way of managing your supply chain.
Tracking can give us confidence in the things that we’ve purchased, the companies that we’re doing business with, and sometimes even in ourselves. Often if we aren’t getting any sort of tracking or visibility, how do we feel? We might feel a little confused or frustrated not necessarily knowing what comes next.
— Amy Johnson, Director, Logistics Products and Solutions, Cardinal Health when describing their decision to provide their customers access to FourKites tracking metrics
The current business environment demands a cross-functional and data-driven approach to make your supply chain work for you, not against you. To stay ahead of the curve, manufacturing executives need to be ready to pull five key levers to move faster, create more budget flexibility, improve scorecards, win over customers, and empower frontline employees. By focusing on these areas, companies can ensure that their supply chain supports growth and customer retention, while mitigating risk and staying ahead of market trends.
FourKites is a decision making engine that connects your global supply chain to AI and advanced analytics to help teams move faster, and with more precision.
Have your team contact us for a free consultation where we’ll take a deep dive into your business operations and provide a complimentary business opportunity summary analysis with expected returns.
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