Identifying and Mitigating Supply Chain Pain Points

Supply chain disruptions are inevitable. Eventually, a problem will arise that threatens to create costly delays and unhappy customers. Fortunately, it is possible to take steps to ensure goods move along even the most complex global supply chains without interruption. Gaining this ability to pre-mitigate issues before they arise requires identifying and constantly monitoring common supply chain pain points for any red flags.

Perfect order rate, a measurement of a company’s ability to fulfill orders on time and free of errors, is one important KPI to consider when measuring the viability of supply chain management. It accounts for variables such as when an order leaves the warehouse, whether it contains the correct quantity and quality of items, whether the customer receives it on time, and if there are any issues involving returns or payment. Although it’s simple math: subtract the failed orders from the perfect orders, but in reality, several factors can make measurement difficult. The customer may not provide feedback, so the company doesn’t learn about a failed order until after the customer files an official complaint or makes a return. Another common challenge is a lack of data sharing among supply chain partners, which hinders supply chain visibility.

Other KPIs to monitor include:

• Cash-to-cash time cycle measures the time between when the company pays its suppliers and when it receives money from its customers. It examines three key factors: days of inventory (DOI), days of payables (DOP), and days of receivables (DOR) to determine the amount of cash the company requires to fund its day-to-day business operations.
• Supply chain cycle time determines how long it will take for a supply chain to fulfill an order if it runs out of stock by measuring the total time to produce, package, and deliver the product. The shorter the time, the more agile, flexible, and resilient the supply chain becomes.
• Inventory turnover is based onhow many times the company sells its entire inventory within a specific period (e.g., per month, quarter, or year). The lower the number, the weaker the sales and revenue generation.

One of the most common factors that negatively affect these and other supply chain health KPIs is a lack of data that companies need to achieve complete real-time visibility over their entire supply chain. Consider the hypothetical example of a single shipment that must pass through more than 2000 interactions with suppliers and partners as it moves from source to final destination because a single blind spot can inevitably lead to unexpected disruptions. These can range from a supplier filing for bankruptcy or a dockworker strike to natural occurrences like weather-related events or, as the world learned the hard way, a global pandemic to geopolitical events.

Data empowers supply chain visibility. Without it, an organization cannot gather accurate insights into its global operations and be proactive in identifying and addressing problems before they turn into  severe disruptions. That’s why ARC Advisory Group predicts rising demand for technologies that enable companies to identify and respond quickly to supply chain issues and foster tighter collaboration with supply chain partners.

Businesses can utilize digital supply chain connectivity with solutions like PartnerLinQ by Visionet to gain full supply chain visibility. PartnerLinQ’s innovative capabilities, including intelligent automation, multi-channel integration, and real-time analytics seamlessly connect multi-tier supply chain networks and channels, marketplaces, and core systems worldwide to deliver unified connectivity. To learn more about how PartnerLinQ can help your organization achieve complete supply chain visibility, please visit our website.

How to Achieve Complete Visibility of Your Global Supply Chain

If you feel like your company faces an unending series of supply chain disruptions, you’re not alone. 68% of supply chain executives Gartner surveyed report that they have been constantly responding to high-impact disruptions over the last three years — and most of them did not have time to recover before the next disruptive event hit them.

Achieving end-to-end visibility over your company’s supply chain must be a top priority for 2022. Success requires gaining the ability to capture and analyze data in real-time to execute decisions more quickly and effectively.

Translation: stop running supply chain operations on legacy solutions, disparate siloed systems, and outdated business processes like updating spreadsheets. Ingesting real-time operational data from the supply chain ecosystem will significantly improve planning and decision-making processes and execution and make a company more agile and better able to adapt when the next inevitable disruption strikes.

“In 2022 and beyond, chief supply chain officers (CSCOs) must update their vision to account for ongoing and unimagined disruption to global networks, operating models, and stakeholder demands,” says Simon Bailey, senior director analyst at Gartner. “Some of these disruptions are externally driven — such as material shortages, climate-driven disruption, or labor scarcity. Others are driven by the organization’s own digital transformation plans.”

The story of how a $110 million company and secure storage industry leader succeeded in achieving this level of visibility over its complex global supply chain can serve as a lesson to any company striving to improve supply chain resiliency.

The company manufactures a wide range of products from small, portable security cases to large fire and waterproof safes under various brands. A comprehensive analysis of its supply chain revealed that it needed deeper and more automated integration with its trading partners and end-to-end transaction visibility.

Despite operating in a modern Microsoft Dynamics 365 environment, their supply chain solution was not fully integrated with the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system or with the growing direct-to-consumer delivery business, which had grown significantly since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. This forced reliance on several manual processes for collecting and analyzing data, such as orders, invoices, and advanced ship notices (ASNs). The entire direct-to-consumer business lacked visibility, and the electronic data interchange (EDI) solution could not facilitate real-time data sharing. There was no real-time visibility, control, error handling, automation, or analytical capacity.

The company decided to implement PartnerLinQ by Visionet, a digital supply chain connectivity solution with innovative capabilities, including intelligent automation, multi-channel integration, and real-time analytics that seamlessly connect multi-tier supply chain networks and channels, marketplaces, and core systems worldwide to deliver unified connectivity.

A critical factor in selecting PartnerLinQ was that it delivers a proprietary supply chain app ecosystem with EDI, B2B, and API management solution for Dynamics 365 that address the need for visibility, control, error handling, automation, and analytics. The PartnerLinQ platform was able to provide the hyper-automation that the company required, beginning with the direct integration of purchase orders into Dynamics 365. This integration was followed by the implementation of an internet draft security standard (or AS2), which was designed to enable business transactions to move securely over the internet and enable the quick transmission of process data.

PartnerLinQ helped the company achieve complete visibility over its supply chain, significantly reducing costs and streamlining its operations by automating processes, enabling business rules, and the rapid transmission of order-to-cash transaction processing through API and EDI.  PartnerLinQ’s innovative, process-centric approach to automation eliminated the need to make transaction adjustments manually. Tracking document counts, invoices, audits, and overall document lifecycles, became much easier and more visible than ever before. To learn more, follow this link to download the complete case study.

Overcoming the many current and emerging supply chain challenges companies worldwide now face will be top of mind for the hundreds of supply chain executives who will gather in Orlando, Fla., June 6-8 for Gartner® Supply Chain Symposium/Xpo™ 2022 – the year’s largest event dedicated to helping supply chain executives mitigate risk and navigate uncertainty in an increasingly dynamic and challenging environment.

We will be among these industry leaders attending this important event. We’re excited to meet with you in person at our booth (Booth #109) to brief you on how our exciting new solutions can help you improve supply chain resilience and overcome any future disruptions.

Additionally, two of our senior executives will lead interactive educational sessions during the Gartner event:

• Monday, June 6: Ahmed Raza, Vice President – Head of Product Engineering and Strategy at PartnerLinQ by Visionet, will deliver a presentation on identifying and understanding growing supply chain challenges and outline strategies for overcoming them.
• Tuesday, June 7: Deepak Das, Senior Vice President – Digital Transformation at Visionet, will lead a special 45-minute roundtable discussion on “Achieving Complete Visibility of a Supply Chain.”

If you do not plan to make the trip to Orlando, follow this link to schedule a demonstration of how PartnerLinQ can help your organization achieve complete supply chain visibility on a day and time that works best for you.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the instability of global supply chains which resulted in crisis across industries. Supply chains everywhere are still facing pressures in changing consumer demand. Consumption patterns have shifted as well – leading to higher shipping volumes and freight costs.

Today, it is important that organizations understand the factors that get in the way of supply chain recovery. They can then take the right measures to ensure not only the survival but also the success of their business.

What Hinders Supply Chain Recovery?

Supply chain recovery is a fundamental aspect of supply chain resilience and disaster management. According to a study published in the engineering management review, supply chains usually take longer to overcome more demanding challenges such as pandemics. This makes identifying challenges vital so that organizations can plan and create apt and effective strategies to carry on with their business.

One such challenge has been longstanding bottlenecks in supply chains. They have not only raised costs but also shortages in labor. As of December 2021, theUS Bureau of Labor estimated that there were only 11 million job openings in the country. The drastic decrease in job openings has slowed down overall growth and contributed to inflation, which at one point, sat at a 29-year high.

Due to such high inflation, most companies are passing the costs along, damaging supply chains even more due to rising input costs. A survey of 52 items, including forest products, agricultural products, energy, metals, and more, has shown how this impact is far wider than commonly believed. The survey showed that the average input increase has been 95% when compared to pre-pandemic levels.

There’s Light at the End of the Tunnel

By most estimates, this disruption is likely to persist throughout 2022 at the very least, with 2023 touted as a more likely possibility by some business leaders. This situation may be somewhat normalized in the long run. To understand the state of change that global businesses are going through, it is important to consider real-life examples to see how global enterprises are reacting to the crisis.

For General Electric Co., issues in its supply chains were present across all its business units. However, its healthcare unit especially faced more problems than any other part of its business. As a result, GE drove up its expenses for transportation and raw materials which, in turn, affected its onshore wind business. This is why the company raised prices and tried to suppress costs while looking for new suppliers, sourcing alternative parts, and redesigning product configurations. Such a period of transition saw GE’s Q4 2021 revenue take a hit.

According to S&P Global, however, many non-financial corporations worldwide have found it easy to absorb or cancel out cost inflation. They have been able to do so via demand shifts and offsets, hedging, product mix adjustments, cost pass-throughs, positive operational gearing, and a low rate of pay growth. But they still expect profit margin pressure to rise in 2022.

The Answer

One study has recommended a framework for supply chain management and operations during the pandemic across six distinct perspectives— digitalization, preparedness, adaptation, recovery, causality, and sustainability.

In the middle of present uncertainty, such a wide outlook can help organizations recover from supply chain issues quickly and efficiently. Today, solutions need to account for evolving requirements of enterprises, concerning supply chain integrations and all-around visibility. Only then can a solution help them overcome this situation with ease.

Explore PartnerLinQ:

A Supply chain visibility app ecosystem, with Native Applications that offer rapid interoperability and next-generation monitoring.

Some of the native apps in the PartnerLinQ app ecosystem include:

1. Order to Cash
2. Procure to Pay
3. Ecommerce Order Management
4. Return Verification & Management
5. Intelligent Invoice Matching
6. Web EDI
7. Cross Dock, DTC & Drop Shipments
8. Freight Integrations
   
    

Step into the next frontier of supply chain resilience. Contact us for a demo today!

What’s new this holiday season?

While the Thanksgiving holiday has passed and we remain grateful for another wonderful year, we were treated to a visit from the technology elves on our return. The elves mentioned that they were hard at work finalizing the new release of PartnerLinQ as the holidays approach and were stopping by in order to demonstrate some its advanced features.

The Platform

The platform has been given an upgrade and the dashboard is sleek, smooth and faster than ever before. an ever before.

Recent Activities, located in the center, ensures PartnerLinQ customers remain proactively informed of the latest activities.

Recently Assigned Customers are just to the left, ensuring PartnerLinQ customers actively engaged in onboarding have a front row seat. It’s here that PartnerLinQ customers can visually ascertain the status of any onboarding customer at any point in the onboarding process.

Systems and Tasks alerts are on the right, and subscriptions can be toggled on and off by the user at any time.

Further down and always visible is a Support button that helpfully opens the support window.

With one-click you can search the support FAQ and access email and telephone support. The platform features Google-like search functionality at the top of the page, ensuring that anything a PartnerLinQ customer is looking for is one click away.

We make it easy. We keep it simple. And it is all in one place.

The Evolution

This holiday season, we are reminded that the evolution of PartnerLinQ has been a special process.  From the very beginning, our commitment to “making it easy and keeping it simple and putting everything in one place” has been an inspiration to not only our team and the technology elves, it has also inspired prospects to become customers and strangers to become friends. Now, having been on this path for a few years, the next few years are looking even more promising.

The Extensible Platform

Putting everything in one place is a core tenet of the PartnerLinQ extensible platform. Everything is accessible, from a selection of widgets that can be added to the user’s home screen to a selection of APIs and tools that can be added to your PartnerLinQ subscription. Speaking with some of our customers recently, the reaction to the new extensible platform has been, “I can’t wait for Christmas!”

The Upgrade

The upgrade to the new PartnerLinQ Platform, like everything else we do, is included with the platform. We’re all about making it easy and while the Azure-hosted subscription model has been available for some time, some self-hosted and licensed PartnerLinQ instances remain. PartnerLinQ customers keeping it simple today on the self-hosted and licensed PartnerLinQ instances will benefit from the ways we are making it easier tomorrow.

The Apps

We think of the apps as the best presents under the tree this year. Instant Ocean and Scan2EDI are the first of many PartnerLinQ solutions moving to the PartnerLinQ “in-app” subscription model. Available exclusively to PartnerLinQ customers, PartnerLinQ apps connect subscribers with Visionet IP products, factories, distributors, 3PL service providers, payment gateways, and more.

Instant Ocean is the newest PartnerLinQ IP and brings real value to PartnerLinQ customers who are also ocean freight participants. Instant Ocean is an “in-app” subscription to complete container visibility delivered to the user dashboard. Imagine integrated, automated, and reliable ocean status at your fingertips. Instant Ocean container updates can be delivered to the PartnerLinQ dashboard or directly to the enterprise. Instant Ocean even makes use of business rules and alerting so you can have it your way. Your port, your container, Trans-Atlantic, Trans-Pacific, and everywhere in between. Instant Ocean removes human intervention from your ocean-going freight and delivers real business insight.

Scan2EDI assembles the best modern technologies in one easy-to-use solution reaching well beyond that of ordinary optical character recognition (OCR). Beginning with OCR, PartnerLinQ makes use of robotic process automation (RPA) for data retrieval and data extraction, OCR for transformation, indexing, and image storage, and document management software in our intuitive PartnerLinQ platform interface.

PartnerLinQ’s business process outsourcing ensures that any transaction not immediately recognized receives an initial review and response so that PartnerLinQ customers have the option to add transactions, integrations, vendors, and customers mid-flow. This can happen because mapping and error handling are fully automated, the function includes business rules that fit our client’s business expectations, and with built-in alerts, no transactions are ever overlooked or missed. Artificial intelligence ensures transactions are sorted, tagging, and routed through processing and should an unexpected transaction be encountered, automated error handling takes care of the alerting your business team.

Application integration is what PartnerLinQ’s Scan2EDI was designed for and with our enterprise integration framework, Scan2EDI transactions land as expected in the enterprise whether they’re purchase orders (POs), advanced ship notices (ASNs), invoices, shipping documents, or any of the 500-plus available transactions that Scan2EDI was designed to handle out of the box.

Happy Holidays!

Whatever holidays you celebrate, we think that PartnerLinQ’s evolution is a reason for good cheer. With better visibility and flexibility, we’re adding even more resilience to your supply chain, and in these uncertain times as we sort out the “new normal,” resilience is the key to success.

So, enjoy the time off from work, spend time doing the things you love, and we’ll see you in the new year with a new evolution of the PartnerLinQ solution that will keep you singing “Happy Holidays” well into the new year. Talk with our experts to learn more.

By Thomas A Smith Senior EDI Implementation Strategy Consultant  

On a warm morning in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, at a symposium in 2005 the Chief Economist and Director of Research at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) made the following statement…

“While the techniques and instruments to absorb fluctuations have improved, there is uncertainty about how they will perform in a serious downturn.”

The speaker was Ragham Rajan and while he was widely ridiculed at the time, his speech would prove to be prophetic. The 2007-08 financial crisis to follow occurred because market changes and advancements were concentrating risk despite appearing to diversify risk.

The Great Disruption

The world is witnessing an unprecedented level of disruption beginning with COVID-19, followed by supply chain issues, and a growing disruption within the labor market. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the flight of workers from the hospitality industry in September, with a reported 863,000 leaving their positions, fully 6.6% of the hospitality workforce. Across the world we see acute shortages for commodities, including computer chips, furniture, and mobile devices among them. Fortunately, there are no nationwide shortages of food. Although in some cases we might have certain foods with low inventory, food production and manufacturing are widely dispersed in North America. Global Industrialization is suffering, and many manufacturers in the US are reporting a wait of more than 90 days to procure materials and assemble parts to make their products.

The Disruption Today

Beyond the supply chain shortages and bottlenecks there are multiple causes for disruption. The emerging cause can be attributed to a shortage of labor, especially truck drivers, which has stalled production operations across plants, distribution points, and delivery centers. Despite rising unemployment, the gap between labor and unfilled positions is increasing.

With global production chains divided into specialized links over many decades, different industries have become inextricably connected over a period of time. Supply shocks have spread across unlikely industries, such as automobiles and semiconductors, or food and fertilizer.

Perhaps an even more visible cause for disruption lies in oversea shipping. The port crisis in the US has received global attention over the last year due to the immense buildup of ships and the never-ending influx of cargo. What supply chain professionals initially viewed as temporary is now threatening to change global shipping infrastructures from the size of ships to business practices, which relied on speed rather than on efficiency, availability, or visibility. Container ships are now circling ports and remaining at sea for longer periods increasing costs. Sea containers cost more to ship, resulting in exorbitant prices, and the accumulation of goods at shipyards, rail yards and warehouses, a direct result of the aforementioned labor shortage, dominated by a shortage of truck drivers.

Supply Chain News

Attending a supply chain conference last week for the first time in more than 18 months, I had an opportunity to listen to several speakers. One by one each delivered his or her view of what happens next, after the great disruption.

One speaker stated simply, “Supply chain is sexy again” and that caught my attention, for starters, I would agree. Having been largely automated and then ignored, the supply chain is again making news and having work in the supply chain for many years, there is more than a passing interest from John Q. Public on Supply chain matters. The speaker went on to talk about a financial newspaper with wide distribution. The paper, the speaker continued, published a mere handful of supply chain articles each month while in recent months, that handful had exploded to several articles every day. The articles, looking more critically now, are well beyond a single new outlet and appear to have a wide array of supply chain perspectives. Reflections of the articles range in impact from the DOW to the NASDAQ and from Retail to CPG and from staples to emerging technologies and in the virtual world these articles are boundless, including this one, which brings us to the following observation.

Stress Testing the Supply Chain

The string of supply chain disruption following the pandemic has resulted in the biggest stress test for supply chain leaders the world over, retail executives in North America anticipate issues to last beyond 2022. What appeared at first to be temporary has now turned into a series of long-lasting setbacks, some perhaps resulting in a permanent state of disruption in some industries. Considering the nearly two years since the onset, when and how these disruptions will end remain a matter of conjecture. The answers are not to be found, not in anyone’s tea leaves, not yet.

The Future of Supply Chain

In order to future-proof, supply chain leaders are facing factors of change that have not been previously considered or discussed, solutions from worker migration to flexible labor practices and the movement of sourcing to new sourcing centers in emerging markets or those which can be more closely controlled or deliver an environmentally neutral position. The solution is in resolving multiple issues in the supply chain as it did way back when plastic hangers seemingly changed to black overnight.

The Solution Approach

Renewing the approach to transparency and visibility across the supply chain is critical in light of the uncertain future in this period of the Great Disruption, now clearly extended, with no end in sight. Increased transparency can better prepare stakeholders to deal with changing regulatory, environmental or compliance requirements while solving supply chain dilemmas. Visibility, through better partner communication, is becoming increasingly important to supply chain leaders that I spoke with at the conference. The importance of end-to-end communication with suppliers and partners across the trading network from their perspective cannot be overstated. Through the right technology, organizations can ensure that the appropriate information is collected, stored, and disseminated, and when partners are onboarded quickly to meet these unexpected scenarios, the results are a positive impact on business and on other concerns.

Supply Chain Advantage

The PartnerLinQ advantage is its hybrid cloud architecture and easy partner onboarding, PartnerLinQ delivers a smarter B2B/B2C Integration platform with automated End-to-End Workflows and includes business rules for omnichannel integration.

PartnerLinQ’s unique approach to supply chain can help your organization communicate with your partners rapidly, ensuring end-to-end digital connectivity across all functional areas and through a centralized visibility platform.

PartnerLinQ zeroes in on issues, tracks them, and provides detailed analysis of all of your partners, including all of their inbound and outbound transactions and can generate alerts for specific partner events, delivering the insight your users need to address supply chain issues immediately.

Scan2EDI converts your manual process into electronic transactions using robotic process automation, optical character recognition, document management software, business process outsourcing, and artificial intelligence. Scan2EDI offers application integration advantages including PartnerLinQ’s ERP Integration Framework.

Instant Ocean Visibility provides container status at your fingertips. Integrated, automated, and reliable, your port – your container, Instant Ocean Visibility removes human intervention from container tracking, eliminates endless web searches, eliminates phone calls & email and eliminates voice messages and call backs.

Take control of your supply chain in the present and forge a new one for the future with PartnerLinQ. Talk with our experts to learn more.

By Kevin Balentine, PartnerLinQ

Reimagining the Consumer Electronics Supply Chain: The Three Key Challenges for 2021

Disrupted Supplies

In March 2020, McKinsey forecast[1] electronics companies could face serious reductions in inventory due to epidemic-induced factory shutdowns. This was a clear signal to electronics suppliers that the diversification strategies initially developed during the predicted US-China trade war were quickly becoming a recommended path.

But while companies scrambled to onboard suppliers, the move could not mitigate the disruption. 53% of electronics industry leaders were anticipating delays or cancellations in new product launches by May 2021, with 91% of the shortage attributed to challenges in supply chain management [2].

Frenzied Demand

The need for semiconductor chips has continued to surge with the advent of newer automotive technologies such as electric vehicles, collision avoidance and automatic braking systems, real-time navigation, night vision, and lane-change warning systems. There’s no predictable relief in demand for these and other advanced technologies involving artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles.

The Semiconductor Industry Association has projected global chip sales to grow 8.4% in 2021 – a massive 5.1% hike in a $433 billion industry. With much of the world’s workforce having migrated to home offices and home-based leisure activities, computers, tablets, and gaming consoles are in high demand and chip production is struggling to keep up. A year after McKinsey’s original forecast, the world’s biggest chipmakers like AMD and Qualcomm continue to announce new shortages.

And the impact is not limited to consumer electronics or sub-systems. GM extended its automobile production cuts in the US, Canada, and Mexico; other automotive giants like Ford, Honda, and Fiat/Chrysler have also warned investors about slowdowns in new vehicle production due to chip shortages.

So has begun a cycle of delayed customer value and intense competition among vendors and a new race to market supply chain capabilities which hold the key to delivering increased value in the supply chain.

Challenges in Supply Chain Management

This widespread shortage in semiconductor chips has underlined the critical role of their supply chain in today’s economy. While optimized supply chains in the electronics industry had helped temper the explosion of IT and digital services in the past two decades, several unexpected factors have since emerged with the potential to disrupt the optimized global model.

There are three key challenges –challenges of immediate concern and which the consumer electronics supply chain needs to address in order to deliver the right product, in the right quantity, at the right price, place, and time.

Geographical Concentration

The world’s largest chip makers continue to largely depend on manufacturing centers in China. While some supply chains had begun to migrate towards other manufacturing centers, such as those in Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, these migrations occurred very close to the beginning of the pandemic.

Since then, China, who recovered rapidly from its pandemic-induced slowdown, continues to dominate US electronics imports, while the other centers have been slower to respond. They also have the disadvantage of being newer players in the market, which means less depth in terms of production inventories, staff, and other resources. 

Such geographical concentration of manufacturing activity carries an inherent risk, which was laid bare first during the US-China trade (tariff) war and then by the global pandemic. Given China’s existing supply and production infrastructures, most of the larger manufacturing entities have decided to stay put. A recent PwC survey said as much, stating that most companies are planning a ‘China +1 strategy’ once the pandemic subsides. This strategy involves relying on China as the primary source, while looking to one other country as a strategic manufacturing alternative.

US companies are similarly keen to nearshore operations to countries like Mexico; however, all of these plans have been complicated by uncertain economic and trade climates.

Product Lifecycle and Complexity

Advances in technology and rapidly changing customer behavior have also had an impact on the life of the average electronic product, leading to challenges in supply chain management. Companies have to carry larger inventories or depend on faster inventory turns; this increases overall inventory costs and significantly impacts the bottom line in the event of a short lifecycle product or worse, a product failure.

Electronics companies push for newer and more complex product variants to remain competitive. Having outsourced part or all of their manufacturing process to specialized centers, they remain vulnerable.

Integrity of Supply

Vulnerabilities increase as product components move through multiple facilities and geographies and the chance of counterfeits increases. A lack of supply chain visibility makes components and raw materials increasingly difficult to trace. While companies spread out the manufacturing of parts and assemblies across regions to reduce the risk, vulnerabilities continue to appear.

‘Nearshoring’ and localized manufacturing have the potential to enhance traceability of parts and assemblies. But consumer electronics supply chains also need solutions with increased visibility capabilities to strike a balance and mitigate multiple risks simultaneously.

Working Towards a More Distributed Supply Chain

Over the last few decades, consumer electronics companies have leveraged their global supply chains for cost advantages and specialized manufacturing expertise. But factors such as tariffs, the fallout from the pandemic, and a perceived failure of just-in-time logistics have renewed the push for regionalization.

Industry leaders must be proactive to ensure a more distributed and more collaborative future. Consumer electronics supply chains need digital solutions that facilitate easy entry into new markets and with new suppliers, centrally optimize their supply chains, and provide an end-to-end visibility from point of order to delivery.

Integrated Systems for Enhanced Collaboration

Investing in enterprise IT and supply chain solutions to optimize individual business processes shows promise. But these investments often lead to multiple solutions, ranging from spreadsheets to portals to demand and supply chain planning tools, many of which are loosely integrated at the enterprise level.

As a result, supply chain partners continue to operate on multiple systems and platforms, creating an even larger integration challenge. Network architectures with limited flexibility cannot accommodate multi‐party, multi‐tier supply chain structures that exist between customers, manufacturers, and trading partners.

A modern supply chain in the electronics industry needs access to real‐time supply and demand transactions. It needs a flexible platform that allows each company in the supply chain to implement its own processes – one that makes sense to their culture and way of doing business. More specifically, the platform should drive visibility, planning, communication, analysis, and execution in perfect orchestration across unlimited numbers of trading partners.

Such a platform will allow trading partners to execute activities in their own home-based systems and communicate along the supply chain as required for order to cash, freight, and trans-ocean transactions. This makes an agile and scalable cloud‐based architecture all the more critical. An easy-to-deploy supply chain solution can help organizations build their capabilities in stages. This ensures immediate and incremental value at each stage, paving the way for self-funded deployment and reserving capital for events yet to unfold.

About PartnerLinQ: Enterprise Connectivity at the Speed of Business

PartnerLinQ is an innovative, process-centric, easy-to-use EDI solution that enables API-led, cloud native integrations. With a simplified B2B communication engine that includes EDI, AS2, SFTP and real-time APIs, PartnerLinQ is a fully integrated platform and easily handles both standard and proprietary file-based formats, including custom integrations. The solution is well suited for retail, e-commerce, wholesale, transportation, 3PL, as well as distribution, digital, and analog partner extensible platform and helps your team achieve operational efficiency and gain real-time visibility.

PartnerLinQ is designed by a team with more than 25 years of experience in providing industry-focused leadership in technology and consulting and in the development of innovative solutions that drive global supply chain transformation from the factory floor to the consumer’s doorstep. Hosted on Microsoft Azure, the PartnerLinQ platform integrates natively with Microsoft Dynamics 365, while also providing robust support for integration with other ERP systems as well as e-commerce platforms.

 

[1] Knut Alicke, Xavier Azcue, Edward Barriball. (Mar 2020). McKinsey. Supply-chain recovery in coronavirus times

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/supply-chain-recovery-in-coronavirus-times-plan-for-now-and-the-future

[2] Supplyframe. (May 2020). Supplyframe Electronics Sourcing Report.

https://supplyframe.com/press-releases/supplyframe-electronics-sourcing-report-highlights-innovation-imperative-amid-covid-19/