Competition is at the core of the success or failure of firms, and with HafeziCapital’s Supply Chain Management Consulting you can increase your margins by optimizing your global supply chain. To achieve and maintain a competitive advantage, firms develop competitive strategies to establish profitable and sustainable positions against the forces that determine industry competition. More often today firms are implementing these strategies through foreign markets. Firms that strive to be cost leaders in the market are drawing on components or raw materials available at reduced prices from countries such as India, China, Vietnam or Mexico. Other firms that position themselves as market differentiators are adopting improved manufacturing technologies available elsewhere globally.
Firms are developing global competitive advantages by taking advantage of international economies of scale, scope, and learning from different foreign markets. They are increasingly identifying location specific advantages and exploiting the cost differentials in factors of production such as labor, land, technology and markets, or governmental incentives. This constant search for developing and maintain a competitive advantage in local and global markets, has shifted the focus of managers to their growing and expanding supply chains.
Supply Chain Audits
Supply Chain Audits are designed to be a pre-liminary process to analyze and develop a core understanding of the existing supply chain. The data collection methodology for supply chain management audit may consist of examining relevant company documents, talking to suppliers, outsourcers, freight shipping companies, and an in-depth on the ground interview with key employees. Once all of the data is compiled the HafeziCapital Supply Chain Management consulting team meets to discuss the findings and analyze the data. A final report is delivered to senior management with an on-site detailed presentation of the findings, areas for improvements, and short and long-term actions. CLICK HERE FOR CASE STUDY
Supply Chain Management Consulting
Effective supply chains management can be one of the most successful methods to improve operational efficiency. Having a lean and effective supply chain can make any organization a market leader. HafeziCapital proprietary research shows that supply chain leaders outperform their competitors by more than 45% on key metrics such as inventory turnover. Organizations that undertake a holistic approach to supply chain management emerge as the runaway winners.
Supply chain management has become a very popular topic for both practitioners and researchers in the past two decades. Despite the fact that supply chain management is a concept that dates back to the building of the pyramids, it has caught the attention of researchers and practitioners in the past 25 years. The term supply chain management became popular in the early 1980’s and started gaining the attention of practitioners and academics because it was viewed as the next source of competitive advantage.
A supply chain includes suppliers/vendors, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers that are interconnected by transportation, information and financial infrastructure. Supply chain members are interconnected by a significant physical flow that includes raw materials, work-in-process inventories, finished products and returned items, as well as the associated flows of information and finances that accompany the physical flows. The goal of a supply chain is to maximize customer value and minimize system-wide costs for each participant. To achieve this goal, businesses must now compete as an integral part of a supply chain and no longer as individual firms.
This notion of competing as a supply chain has drawn attention to the best methods and approaches to supply chain management to maintain a competitive rigor in the market and ensure a degree of operational flexibility by collaborating and coordinating across different supply chain processes resulting in supply chain process integration. Supply chain processes are structured and measured sets of activities and functions designed to produce specific outcomes for the customer or market being served such as: customer relationship management, demand management, customer order fulfillment, supplier management, selection, and qualification, establishing and managing inbound and outbound logistics, designing work flow and production management, acquiring and maintaining process technologies, order processing, managing multiple channels, and managing returns.
Many research studies found a strong relationship between improvements in supply chain processes and improvements in operational flexibility, logistics performance, and overall firm performance. One of the ways to develop a higher level of supply chain flexibility, in a constantly changing environment, is through improved process integration of both a firm and its key suppliers and customers. The use of knowledge and expertise of supply chain members to complement and enhance internal capabilities may help reduce concept-to-customer cycle time, costs, quality problems, and improve the overall design effort by becoming more flexible. Flexible supply chains are better equipped to respond to a constantly changing and dynamic global environment. Maintaining a competitive advantage is no longer achieved by low costs and high quality alone, flexibility has become an essential component in this formula. This allows firms to become more efficient (less effort and cost to respond to changes) and more effective (less time) than competition. Improvements in operational efficiency and effectiveness can improve a firm’s overall financial performance by reducing the resources used in the process while achieving the desired goals or objectives.
Improved supply chain management processes can reduce cycle time and improve customer service. Firms focusing on managing the elapsed time between a customer’s order placement and receipt of the desired property strive to eliminate wasted time, effort, and inventory in developing their logistics capability. Such time responsiveness of the move/store activities and better utilization of resources enables a firm to translate an order into a finished product quickly and accurately, thus, capturing the time-sensitive buyers better than competitors. Reducing total order cycle time as well as the variability required for order transmittal, order processing, order preparation, and transit also allows businesses to respond to demand fluctuations with less distortion of the order cycle process. This can improve firm performance by improving customer satisfaction, reducing order processing costs, and reacting quicker to changes in the environment.
Purchasing & Supply Management
HafeziCapital can assist its clients with purchasing and supply chain issues in a variety of settings, from process industries to high tech manufacturing and services as well as public institutions. Supply Management concepts, both strategic and tactical, are analyzed and new processes can be developed. HafeziCapital can assist its clients in all aspects of the purchasing function and cost issues, via proven and customizable supply chain methodologies.