4 Critical Tips for Managing Your Supply Chain Data

If you work with supply chain data management on a daily basis, you probably understand just how difficult it can be to manage and analyze, but what you probably don’t realize is that it has the potential to dramatically impact your entire business for better or worse.

Your data is essential to making well-informed business decisions, identifying trends, collaborating with your trading partners, and maximizing your profits. If you don’t recognize the impact it has, you most likely don’t have the proper tools in place to gain actionable insights.

Those insights are critical because they allow you to identify potential problems and make process improvements to your operation. That’s why we took it upon ourselves to provide you with some tips for getting the most out of your supply chain data management to make it more useful for you to improve your business processes and drive better decision-making.

1. Understand What Your Business Can Gain

It’s important to have a plan in place to identify errors within your supply chain processes. That means staying proactive and anticipating problems before they arise. An effective way to go about this is to thoroughly analyze your entire process (late shipments, defaulted payments, missing purchase orders) and close the gap from order to cash. This will not only enable you to avoid those pesky chargebacks and fines you receive from trading partners, but will also make your business more efficient and maximize productivity.

2. Build a Sound Data Strategy

Getting the most out of your data means letting it work for you. That’s why you should automate your processes (where possible) to prevent human error from negatively impacting your business. You should also develop a way to be notified to stay ahead of potential issues and quickly resolve them before they become major headaches for your business. It’s also important to collaborate and have an open line of communication with your internal teams to create accountability for their KPIs and monitor that information to make adjustments on the fly.

3. Visualize Your Data to Gather Insights

Once you’ve captured your data, you need to interpret it. Ideally, you’d like to create a compelling, big picture overview what it means to your business’ health. You can do this by using dynamic charts, graphs, and reports to paint a picture for less technical users on the business side. While doing this, it’s important to draw comparisons of your data over different time periods to discover trends, predict sales timetables, and answer business process-related questions such as “Am I getting paid on time?”

4. Put Those Insights Into Action

When you’ve obtained your insights, you’re going to want to share them with your entire company to promote cross-team functionality and drive company-wide collaboration. You should also share it with your partners so you’ll both be able to view and manage that data within the same environment to create accountability and transparency. This in turn will free up your valuable IT resources, enabling them to get back to working on more critical business tasks.

And there you have it. You’re a pro at reading your supply chain data now.

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