How to Implementing Plan in Supply Chain – planning | management | process
How to Implementing Plan in Supply Chain
There’s an old saying, plans are useless, but planning is everything. And that’s true for supply chains, too. Implementing supply chain management starts with understanding how we want our supply chain to work. That’s why plan is the first supply chain process group in the score model.
Let’s look at the main elements to consider when planning your supply chain and some of the systems you can include in the process. There are four main elements at the heart of any supply chain. First, your customers. Naturally, this includes the people who buy your products or services directly, but it can also include your customers’ customers and anyone else downstream who will be relying on you to deliver a product or service.
The next element is your products or services. These are things that you make and deliver that have value to your customers. Third, your resources, including your suppliers, your facilities, and your staff. Basically anything you need in order to make and deliver products. And the fourth element is your constraints. What are the deadlines you need to meet and what capacity limitations do you have? To manage these elements of a supply chain effectively, we need systems. And when we talk about systems, we can actually mean two different but related things.
First, we use the word system to describe a language and a set of rules that provide consistency across a process. You can implement a planning system for your products by using a product road map. To plan your resources, you can take advantage of tools, like manufacturing resource planning and enterprise resource planning that plan your production schedules. Making a product is important, but you also need to plan your delivery systems. That’s how customers will order and receive product from you. And you need to plan a return system to govern the reverse supply chain. Returns could be products that were damaged or defective, so you want a closed-loop system that provides feedback to the rest of your supply chain and can help you prevent those problems in the future.
Effective supply chain management starts with the processes you use for planning all of your other processes, and that’s why plan is the first process group in the score model.