Unlocking Efficiency: Anaplan's Role in Continuous (Kaizen) Supply Chain Improvement
By: Emre Mese
No matter the scale of your supply chain operations or the types of challenges your organization is grappling with, one potential way forward involves embracing the principles of Kaizen. This methodology is based on making continuous improvements to better your performance, which means you need to excel at both measuring your present status and making meaningful changes.
Your choice of planning technology platform can help you put this philosophy into practice. In today's digitally driven business environment, the combination of best practices and effective tech tools may be just what you need to keep reengineering your supply chain for the better.
Continuous Supply Chain Improvement: What's the Challenge?
Every company will have its own set of supply chain difficulties to overcome, but these issues tend to follow common patterns. When you understand the most frequent issues affecting logistics effectiveness, you may quickly recognize at least some of them from your own operations.
These challenges include:
Inefficiencies: Non-optimized supply chain processes can result in all types of interruptions, hindering overall return on investment. It's common to encounter bottlenecks, delays and redundancies in operations.
Cost overruns: In addition to limiting speed and results, inefficient supply chains are often costly to operate. A lack of well-planned processes can lead to unnecessary spending, putting companies in the red.
Low customer satisfaction: A supply chain functioning at low levels of efficiency is unlikely to please customers. This tends to lead to knock-on effects that further hurt the supply chain, such as lost future sales, as dissatisfied clients look elsewhere.
Data silos: Accessing data is a persistent problem in non-optimized supply chains. A lack of data integration and visibility can hamper decision-making, as well as efforts at effective collaboration and teamwork, with repercussions up and down the supply chain.
Each of these issues on its own is problematic. In combination, they can seriously hamper businesses' overall profitability and performance. So, how do you improve? The first step is to take a close look at your supply chain to see what needs your attention.
How Do You Identify Supply Chain Issues?
Truly impactful continuous improvement is based on targeted action. That means you need a way to precisely determine where the weaknesses reside in your supply chain. Fortunately, there are plenty of signals you can interpret to get to the root of any existing supply chain inefficiencies.
Useful detection methods include:
Data analysis: In-depth analysis of your historical supply chain data can reveal patterns of inefficiency or prime areas to target for improvement. Rather than treating all data as equally relevant, it's worth highlighting the most important metrics.
KPI ranking: When breaking out specific key performance indicators for additional attention, you can focus on which of these measures have the greatest impact on overall supply chain performance. The most vital metrics relate directly to on-time delivery, inventory turnover and customer satisfaction.
Root cause analysis: Once you're tracking the most important KPIs in your supply chain operations, you can launch deeper investigations into root causes of delays and inefficiencies using process mapping and analysis.
Stakeholder feedback collection: In addition to crunching the numbers, you can gather information from the people within your supply chain. These individuals include customers, suppliers and internal team members. Here, too, it pays to focus on your most critical KPIs.
By combining these analytical methods, you can develop an in-depth picture of where the issues exist in your supply chain. This is the first step to consistent process improvement. Next, it's time to formulate a response.
Evaluating Responses: What Are Your Options?
Being faced with problems is one thing. Solving them is another. Considering the wide range of causes and effects behind supply chain issues, your ideal response will be multidisciplinary. You'll need the right technology paired with the most effective, up-to-date processes available.
Some of the top options include:
Implementing specialized technology: An effective planning software platform can become the backbone of your supply chain improvement efforts. Using a solution like Anaplan, tuned to meet your specific requirements, you can give your team an accessible and powerful way to analyze data, model scenarios and build better performance.
Adopting lean practices: Principles designed to cut down on waste, boost efficiency and lower your costs are a reliable choice when seeking ways to improve the overall performance of your supply chain.
Using process automation: Manual practices can lower the effectiveness of any process within a modern business. When too much work is performed manually, there is an increased chance of human error, coupled with lower productivity. Process automation makes repetitive tasks quicker and less demanding while also adding precision.
Redesigning your supply chain network: The overall organizing principles of your supply chain may be holding it back from optimally efficient operations. Making changes to the design, based on analysis and research, can help you build in effectiveness.
Some combination of these options and related processes can help you create a more effective overall supply chain. There's no need to pick one lane at the exclusion of others — in fact, the approaches tend to work best together. When you're using a planning platform like Anaplan, for example, you'll have the data access that will help you implement and measure the effectiveness of process improvement efforts.
Once you get beyond the early stages, you can start to specialize your approach and take specific steps to improve your most important KPIs.
How Do You Pick the Right Approach to Supply Chain Improvement?
Getting the most out of supply chain improvement means getting deeper into your chosen technology tools and strategies, and putting them to work addressing the real issues you're observing on a day-to-day basis.
In practice, this can mean:
Using advanced Anaplan features: Anaplan can increase your data visibility, streamline processes and enable your efforts to make continuous improvement stick.
Integrating your data: In addition to its analytical capabilities, Anaplan works well as a single source of truth for your data, integrating information from multiple sources to drive real-time insights into supply chain performance.
Developing customized models: The planning models your team members use to make educated decisions should be customized to suit your exact situation and needs, driving the metrics that matter most to you.
Enabling cross-functional collaboration: One of the most impactful reasons to have a single source of data truth is the new ability to have people collaborate on continuous improvement projects. This could mean uniting personnel across departments or including external partners.
The common thread between these specific actions is the Anaplan platform. With that reliable technology option at the heart of your planning efforts, achieving ambitious objectives is easier. It's worth taking a closer look at what Anaplan can accomplish for you when implemented well.
What's Anaplan's Role in Supply Chain Process Improvement?
Running down the Anaplan feature set point by point reveals numerous chances to implement continuous supply chain improvement principles that will keep your organization strong — and improving — in the years to come.
Some of these relevant functional areas include
Supply chain visibility: Anaplan can display real-time, data-driven insights from throughout the supply chain, allowing you to pinpoint bottlenecks and efficiencies you can eliminate to enable timely deliveries.
Scenario planning: Anaplan's robust modeling capabilities allow you to forecast potential issues, compare alternative scenarios and align your operations with changing market demand.
Data-driven decisions: The analytics capabilities of the Anaplan platform allow you to measure the changes in specific, high-priority KPIs around delivery timelines, inventory holding costs and overall efficiency.
Collaboration for action: Cross-functional teams can come together with Anaplan's collaborative features. They can work together on addressing the root causes of inefficiencies, aligning their strategies and executing plans that touch multiple personnel groups.
Cost optimization: Drilling down into detailed explorations of your data allows you to find cost-saving opportunities within your supply chain processes. It's easy to spot operational expenses to reduce and efficient plans to implement with such an in-depth view.
Tailored solutions: Anaplan isn't a one-size-fits-all platform. You can tailor the feature set to specifically target the KPIs that matter most to your objectives and reflect your present challenges. You can target efficiency, costs, customer satisfaction or all three in a customized blend.
Technology provides a strong foundation for process improvement in the supply chain. Without a customized Anaplan implementation, you may struggle to effectively track relevant data and make impactful changes. With it, these actions can become a natural part of your workflow.
Ready To Get Started with Anaplan?
Making Anaplan work for you means receiving an implementation that suits your needs and customization to target your business objectives and highest-priority KPIs. Not every technology partner can provide this level of tailored service — to make sure you reach your goals, it pays to work with a top provider.
Allitix's experts understand how to shape an Anaplan implementation to individual needs, receiving eight ParnerAccelereate badges to show their capabilities with different Anaplan use cases. These credentials include certification in supply chain optimization.
When your logistics operations need consistent improvement, it's worth turning to professionals who will get results on the first try. Contact Allitix to learn more.