While supply chains are a big part of the problem, it’s also a big part of the solution. Hence, Supply Chain Optimization is the cornerstone of Sustainability Improvement and is the biggest driver in obtaining a company鈥檚 sustainability goals.

• In 2020, CDP found that GHG emissions in a company鈥檚 supply chain are, on average, 11.4 times higher than its operational emissions.
• In 2020, 239 companies signed the Science Based target Initiative and 94 per cent of them committed to reduce emissions at customers and suppliers.
• (indirect value chain emissions) accounts for 80 per cent of the overall climate impact for many companies. Increased globalization, competition, and continuous supply chain disruptions force companies to be more efficient and agile. In addition, companies need to match their economic objectives while operating in a sustainable manner to meet consumer needs.

Sustainable development of supply chain is a crucial part of any business and an efficient supply chain is imperative.

Sustainability starts with product design, which feeds into the manufacturing and supply chain processes. The supply chain involves the movement of materials and services from upstream to downstream operations of the Supply chain. Today鈥檚 supply chain consists of multiple operations, suppliers across locations, and facilities in different countries, regions, or parts of the world.

A digitalised resilient supply chain helps companies:

• To be more agile (Proactively and profitably sense and respond to market dynamics)
• Increase Productivity (Deliver high-quality, mass-produced, make-to-order products faster)
• Improve connectivity with Business partners
• Run sustainable business practices that maximize reuse and minimize waste of materials from design to operate, minimize carbon footprint across the supply chain network, and protect the health and safety of employees

As we are aware, sustainable sourcing is critical across all industries. It is the process of selecting materials, products, and services from suppliers sustainably. As supply chains continue to expand globally into developing countries, seeking lower costs and greater production capacity, they expose companies to an even wider array of risks. In applying sustainable sourcing, organizations integrate social, ethical, and environmental factors into selecting their suppliers.

Hence, managing the social, environmental, and economic impact of the supply chain is a key priority for companies to achieve long-term success. Not only does this help to comply with sustainability legislation and environmental regulations, but the sustainability of the supply chain can also affect the business鈥檚 profitability, work opportunities, professional partnership, and reputation. It is crucial for companies to collaborate within their own departments and suppliers across their supply chain network to reduce the scope聽 emissions.

How Does Supply Chain Optimization Help Companies on Their Sustainability Journey?

In today鈥檚 supply chain, goods might travel halfway around the world before reaching their final destination, which have a large impact on company鈥檚 carbon footprint. Hence, the collaborative supply chain planning and execution are at the heart of companies’ brand and business success and help companies on their environmental goal.

Let鈥檚 now look at the three areas which help companies in optimizing their supply chain activities and help in reducing indirect emissions that occur in the value chain.

Supply Chain Planning

Supply Chain Planning is the intelligent brain to optimize the supply chain to improve the sustainability goal of the companies. This helps companies to plan resources, inventories, capacities, and ethical sourcing. This is helping companies in reducing overall environmental impact and product wastages across the supply chain.

In many organizations today, the planning team is isolated from the rest of the value-generating teams and plans product demand in siloes. Here are the details on how collaborative and synchronized Supply Chain planning can help companies in reaching their sustainability goal sooner:

• Sustainable supply helps the planner in ethical sourcing across your entire supply chain and better collaborate with suppliers on the sustainability sourcing targets
• Increased forecast accuracy helps to carry optimized inventory across the supply network and also helps to reduce product wastage
• Use sustainability targets and planetary boundaries as capacity constraints
• Resource Optimization helps to optimize equipment and resource usage. This practice allows companies further optimize energy and emissions from the equipment.

Supply Chain Execution

It has been reported that emissions from logistics businesses during the delivery of goods have been upward trajectory, increasing by 1.9% annually since 2000.Most of this can be attributed to the rise of globalisation and increased demand for consumer goods. Transportation is one of the areas in which getting to zero emissions is a key goal for companies which includes reducing travel distances and increasing efficiency. Here are the details on how optimised transportation and warehouse processes helps companies to ensure the logistics processes are managed sustainably by saving resources and protective the environment.

• Transport optimisation: Optimize loads and reduce mileage across operations, making such deliveries more sustainable, end to end 鈥� from raw materials to factory, to the warehouse to doorstep. This helps companies in reducing emissions and costs and improves utilization.
• Warehouse planning to optimize the storage and warehouse activities
• Energy optimization: Use CO2- and energy-optimized warehousing and transportation.
• Worker safety: Develop a process to ensure workers’ safety and that only qualified personnel can handle dangerous goods.

Collaborative Logistics Network

Logistics is complex. It manages the movement of raw materials, intermediate products, and packaging across the globe to manufacturing facilities, as well as the distribution of products from origin to consumption.

Today’s sustainable enterprises want more profound insights into their supply chains, including the sustainability values of their trading partners. Companies want trading partners’ sustainability values to align with their and consumers’ values. 麻豆原创 Business Network, along with our ecosystem of partner applications, creates the transparency needed to make decisions based on a range of criteria. When the performance of existing trading partners doesn’t align with a business’ sustainability goals, shifting to new trading partners has never been easier. With Today’s Collaborative logistics Network, companies can quickly discover new, more sustainable providers across industries and geographies.

A digitalised logistics network helps companies with the following:

• Collaboration for Responsible Sourcing and Purchasing
• Material traceability reinforces sustainability throughout the supply chain to create a trusted network across material flows.
• Collaborative Asset Intelligence Network helps in energy waste reduction
• 聽Efficiently plan and execute delivery

How Can 麻豆原创 Help

麻豆原创’s supply chain management solution helps companies adopt sustainable practices from the product design stage. The solution helps to capture sustainability data across every stage of the supply chain to align with regulatory and corporate sustainability goals while balancing profitability by optimizing supply chain activities across the network.

• recyclable and sustainable products with a minimal carbon footprint, planet-friendly packaging, and a responsible end of life
• to reduce emissions, source materials ethically, and support circular processes
• with minimal waste and environmental impact by monitoring energy use based on production volume
• products and聽optimize logistics to support product traceability and decrease miles聽driven, carbon footprint, and energy use

enables you to collaborate with all trading partners in your supply chain, including suppliers, logistics and services providers, asset operators, maintenance contractors, and more.

helps you to achieve supply chain visibility by enabling plan-driven automation, optimising capacity and inventory, and streamlining procurement workflows to build resiliency in your supply chains.

helps companies to improve freight collaboration, goods tracking across the network, material traceability, and supply chain resilience.

• support shippers in their collaboration with third-party logistics providers.
• solution enables real-time insights into the movement of materials and products to reduce supply chain risks and optimize costs.
• helps to Improve transparency, trust, efficiency, and sustainability by connecting your supply chain.

empowers asset owners, operators, or service providers to better collaborate and share information through a single, consistent version of asset master data to streamline asset servicing processes and reduce maintenance costs.

How to Begin the Journey

• Start Transformation: Gain insight by aligning people, processes, and technology to holistically manage sustainability aspects across your enterprise and the supply chain.
• Get a baseline and identify the hot spots for improvement: Assess how you perform 鈥� environmental, social, and governance impact.
• Focus: Set the overall direction of where you want your company to go. Identify impact areas, and define targets, milestones, and timelines.
• Sustainability Performance: Monitor, measure, analyse and report on improvements around sustainability performance.

The post Supply Chain Optimization Is the Cornerstone of Sustainability Improvement appeared first on 麻豆原创 Southeast Asia News Center.

During a recent online event, Distribution Strategy Group鈥檚 Founder and Senior Partner Ian Heller exposed five major sources of disruption for this vital industry:

1. Workforce: The youngest generations (Generation Y and Generation Z) now make up approximately 70% of the total workforce. These generations are the most technically affluent, which means they expect to be connected on any device, anytime, anywhere, with easy-to-use applications.
2. E-Commerce: E-commerce is no longer just about having a slick website. Today, distributors must have a strong technology foundation to deliver an easy-to-use, personalized, B2C-like purchasing experience for customers.
3. Cybersecurity: The聽COVID-19 pandemic聽has underlined cybersecurity as a prevalent concern as new vulnerabilities arose due to employees working from home. Phishing and ransomware attacks have virtually exploded across every industry in the past few years.
4. Cloud: To stay competitive, many distributors are moving their technology stack to the cloud to lower capital expenditures and enjoy a better margin advantage.
5. Marketplaces: B2B buyers are turning to marketplaces for a one-stop shopping experience. Distributors that can successfully adopt a marketplace model will stand to deepen customer relationships and drive growth.

Heller shared that as an industry, distributors are still working out solutions to these challenges as they continue to adjust to the ever-evolving market challenges. Digital transformation continues to be an enabler of business models, allowing distributors to go from reactive, reporting on things that are happening, to proactive, anticipating the future and mitigating risks.

Magnus Meier, vice president and global head of the Wholesale Distribution Business Unit at 麻豆原创, went on to share that high-tech distributors have started to market themselves as solution aggregators to underline how committed they are to long-term customer relationships, taking care of the product and customer life cycle. In addition, digital transformation continues to play a significant role during the pandemic, specifically in operations. 鈥淒istributors that have a modern ERP system have data on hand, which gives them a significant advantage over their competitors,鈥� says Meier.

Using Services as a Differentiator

For distributors to successfully implement everything from business strategy to operations to customer experience, they first need to determine what is most important to their business. Competitive differentiators come in all shapes and sizes for wholesale distributors, be it a great service like replenishment of bins near the production line, dedicated jobs like delivery of materials, on-site safety training, or even simply having the most responsive, proactive salespeople. Aligning business priorities with competitive differentiators allows distributors to position their business model as not just indispensable to customers, but profitable.

The big players, by and large, are not great at services. Services almost always represent the introduction of variable costs into a business model. Traditionally, distributors have rolled the costs of services into the gross margin of products, but they have not monetized them or charged the cost back to customers. 鈥淚f distributors put a general manager in charge of services, one must treat it the way that a manufacturer treats new product development. Figure out how to monetize it with a P&L to build a business that鈥檚 much different and adds value for their customers,鈥� says Heller.

The technology that enables distributors to have the right level of visibility into their business starts with an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, which is critical to transformation. Having the right processing system enables order-to-cash (O2C) and procure-to-pay (P2P) business processes, which are critical to operations. For many distributors, more than 50% of orders come through as e-mailed PDF or Excel files, creating a manual process for customer sales representatives to then enter the orders into proprietary systems.

Counterintuitive to what distributors assume, the number of manual orders received is increasing, not decreasing. To enable efficiency and resiliency, distributors must find a way to automate manual and redundant tasks and redirect that energy towards value-added efforts. 鈥淐onexiom can help process those orders with the same customer service expectations that a buyer experiences when placing an e-commerce order, a marketplace order, or any other type of digital order,鈥� says Erik Severinghaus, executive vice president of Business Development at Conexiom.

Preempting Issues within the Supply Chain

Whether it鈥檚 due to trade agreements, politics, or biological threats like pandemics, these is less predictability in the supply chain. A good example is what happened at the Suez Canal. The only way distributors can anticipate these issues is to have complete transparency and visibility across the supply chain, all the way through to the demand side. They need to leverage technology to gain the transparency to track which boxes are in which containers and on which ships. And if one of those ships goes astray, they need to be able to understand the implications and trigger follow-up processes to minimize disruption.

鈥淒istributors are operating at greater scale than ever before and it is essential that distributors overcome silos, talk to sellers to overcome those challenges, understand how their customers will be affected, and take mitigating action,鈥� says Meier.

Navigating the Talent Shortage

Every business is grappling with the talent shortage today. To attract the right talent, distributors need to invest in modern technology to bolster employee experience in the workplace. Distributors need to leverage intelligent technologies to automate routine tasks so employees can focus on more complex customer requirements. They need to provide collaboration tools between different teams to drive ongoing business alignment, openness for change, business agility, and improved collaboration between sales, marketing, and demand-planning teams. The distribution industry as a whole must challenge the way it has traditionally handled work-from-home policies, salaries, long-term incentives, and other benefits to make employees want to stay in this lesser-known B2B industry. 鈥淒istributors need to offer a competitive workplace environment, not just against other distributors, but against other industries,鈥� says Severinghaus.

Meier, Severinghaus, and Heller have a lot of commendable and proven advice on these topics. In this聽, these speakers discuss the challenges facing distributors today and provide tangible guidance on how to prepare and respond to market disruptions.

This originally appeared on the global 麻豆原创 News Center.

The post The New Rules of Competition for Today鈥檚 Distributor appeared first on 麻豆原创 Southeast Asia News Center.

The idea of perseverance in the face of adversity is one that coincides with the coming Chinese New Year of the Ox. To many of us in Asia, the ox represents hard work, positivity and most importantly perseverance. These are key traits businesses of all sizes need this year as they stay the course on their digitalisation efforts with a firm eye on Asia鈥檚 growing digital economy. As we ring in the Chinese New Year, what are some of the fundamentals SMEs have to consider as they continue to persevere on their digital transformation journeys?

Building interconnectivity

Looking ahead to 2021, ambitious and fast-growing enterprises should persevere in their embrace of a holistic and interconnected digital-first mindset as they recalibrate for sustained growth in the next decade.

This is especially critical for fast-growing businesses in this region that are looking to position themselves for growth in Asia鈥檚 maturing digital economy. The key ingredient to success is the adoption of a digital-first mindset that is not only focused on technology, but also interconnectedness. Over the course of the last year, we have seen digital-first organisations achieve significant results when it comes to employee productivity, customer interactions and revenue growth.

Interconnectivity also means SMEs will have a clear view that offers them a blueprint to becoming intelligent enterprises regardless of where they are on in their digital transformation journeys. They need to work with a trusted partner that is across their entire business, offering them unprecedented insights for transformation and improvement, enabling faster time to market in a dynamic marketplace.

At the same time, interconnectivity compels businesses to relook at different priorities, including resilience, agility, and efficiency from a fresh perspective 鈥� often involving a whole-of-business approach to management that embraces data sharing and process reimagination to better collaborate across each business unit.

Going back to the basics: rapidly evolving customer experience (CX)

Before a digital transformation can even begin, businesses must . The driving force behind technology decisions should be customers with the aim to make their lives easier instead of making things easier for the business. Most importantly, customer focus is the basis for all other digital transformation decisions.

In 2020, SMEs aggressively started their , but it鈥檚 never truly over. While a focus on customer experience has traditionally been based on transactions with customers, SMEs must keep in mind that the customer experience includes pre- and post-sales interactions too with all stages having the ability to make or break a customer relationship.

To further grow in the coming year, every business leader will need to think about experience differently 鈥� especially when everything we do, from how we shop, to how and where we work, to how we interact with others 鈥� has been structurally upended. An experience renaissance is happening, and the companies that put experience at the centre of their business will spark growth and be the new age of leaders into the year and decade ahead.

Reimagine the supply chain

The pandemic has made us shift our gaze onto the supply chain. Rightly so, it has taken the spotlight for many businesses as many SMEs struggled to pivot and find their footing. We understand things can change overnight, and businesses need to be ready.

The key to regaining composure lies in achieving an agile and intelligent supply chain that鈥檚 capable of providing end to end visibility in the form of a digital supply chain. With this next evolution, SMEs will be able to automate processes, improve decision-making and more importantly, plan ahead any potential disruptions to their supply chains.

The next generation of winning businesses will be defined by their supply chain innovation as much as customer experience reimagination. In fact, both go hand in hand with supply chains having the ability to directly impact customer experience. It is for this reason SMEs must capitalise on the opportunities that arise, remain mindful of such considerations while leveraging a strong digital core to achieve business outcomes and keep up with changing consumer demands.

Looking ahead in the year of the Ox

Digital transformation is an ongoing process, which means continuous change and venturing into the unknown can be difficult, but the benefits that come from creating a forward-thinking, customer-focused, Intelligent Enterprise can be lasting. Combined with interconnected communications and holistic management strategies, the enhanced collaborations across business units showed exciting progress for SMEs 鈥� be it overall cost reductions or reimagination customer and employee experiences.

What鈥檚 more, with 5G鈥檚 growing adoption across Asia, the proliferation of data-driven intelligence will be the game changer for many businesses. As we prepare for a future driven by data, SMEs that have already developed plans to monetise the innovations brought forth by emerging technologies such as 5G will stand in good stead.

Together with our partners, I believe 麻豆原创 can bring a to help midsize businesses achieve value through holistic management strategies.

We鈥檙e ready for the possibilities in Asia. What are you excited about in 2021?

Claus Andresen is senior vice president and head of Midmarket for 麻豆原创 APJ.

The post Persevere With The Spirit of Ox: Building Interconnectivity For Midmarket appeared first on 麻豆原创 Southeast Asia News Center.