How Supply Chain Can Contribute to a Company’s Relevance in a Competitive Market?

Every day, at an alarming speed and with broad access to technology, global supplier and service chains, industrial and commercial companies are becoming increasingly competitive. The question to be asked is, “If everyone has this easy access to suppliers and global services, what will differentiate companies, whether in quality or cost, given that we are talking about an open and highly competitive universe?” The answer is: “Those who can manage their supply chain the best will be more competitive,” “Those who can delight customers with a product very similar to the competition will be more competitive,” and “Those who can be relevant will be more competitive.” And, to be relevant, innovation is mandatory.

Let’s continue this explanation by initially dividing the supply chain into two main quadrants: INBOUND and OUTBOUND.

The INBOUND supply chain should be understood as a cycle that begins when the company’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system plans the resources needed for a sale or the manufacturing of an item—let’s mention SAP, as it is the most widely used currently. It ends when the final product or raw material is in the company’s inventory with all its costs allocated, ready for later use, sale, or production.

The OUTBOUND supply chain should be understood as the entire process from the demand’s entry, complete processes from production, if applicable, management of the Order portfolio, creation of deliveries, shipments, and deliveries.

Further conceptualizing the entire supply chain, we can divide each quadrant into two types: NATIONAL and INTERNATIONAL. Below is an illustration that shows how we understand the entire supply chain:

Just a reminder that the international and national logistics processes are exactly the same in terms of ERP system logic. In other words, the ERP system does not distinguish between one process and another but considers only availability + lead time + costs.

Of course, the import and export process is much more complex due to lead times, costs, and all fiscal and tax-related issues.

Given this scenario, the technology company of the Fiorde Group has created the SIRIUS Platform. The goal of the SIRIUS Platform is to bring complete and integrated management to each of these quadrants, each with its peculiarities and difficulties but incorporating all the complexity within a single logic. In order to achieve this goal, we first worked on modeling the import and export processes, involving supply and planning areas, thus expanding the concept of integration and visibility throughout the chain. Buying and selling planning must be integrated with storage, production, and distribution planning; consequently, an efficient logistics planning needs information from a global logistics chain. The result of this work was the development of the concept of the Global Supply Chain Control Tower. Given the trend of digital transformation, Fiorde, always determined to provide the best service to its clients, has restructured the entire technology area in recent years and now has more than 50 employees dedicated to the development and implementation of dashboards that provide clients with real-time status of their processes. Furthermore, to enable true digital transformation, Fiorde has created a new department within the company called SIRIUS Technology, responsible for implementing projects in the technology and operations areas. All of this new structuring has provided our clients with fundamental changes in technology, culture, operation, and value delivery.

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