Benefits of Cloud-Enabled Management
Over the past year, many organisations transitioned to more digitised operations. This change was made in an effort to better protect employees during the pandemic, and required new processes be put in place to effectively support a remote workforce while maintaining business continuity.
This digital transformation had already been happening at many companies, but COVID-19 served as an immediate catalyst, making the transition an urgent need rather than a lofty goal. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in April of 2020, “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. From remote teamwork and learning, to sales and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security.”
Now more than ever, business leaders are looking toward tools that will empower them to easily share information on an automated basis through digitised documents. In a post-pandemic world, the benefits of permanently utilising remote access cloud-based technologies are clear.
Learn how these tools can help individuals and management teams alike capture new value and reduce inefficiencies in the supply chain as we look ahead toward the future.
Going global with visibility
Organisations are continuing to invest in solutions that empower their teams to be more flexible, agile and resilient. Capturing these capabilities will prove to be key in achieving business continuity and scalability in the coming years.
As explained by MIT Sloan Management Review, COVID-19 revealed to supply chain leaders that their legacy business continuity plans resulted in a lack of transparency. While companies were collecting a massive amount of internal information and data, they lacked visibility into the environments of key actors across their supply chains. This made it difficult to share demand forecasts and communicate changes, resulting in inefficiencies across departments.
In response, policies and practices promoting granular, real-time access for every relevant actor in the supply process are now becoming critical considerations as organisations further digitise their processes.
One business process changing for improved transparency is communication through electronic data interchange. By modernising the traditional business process of sharing information with partners through hardcopies, IBM explains that going digital with EDI saves time and money while improving accuracy and traceability.
Unlike the traditional supply chain environment, today’s operations span the globe. This creates a number of challenges, but the most difficult is in gaining visibility into the many activities that make up the supply chain. Logistics Management explains that this challenge has led business leaders to search for tools that will help them achieve improved transparency and resiliency across all supply functions. When data is scattered across various silos throughout organisations, it becomes difficult to make and execute informed business decisions because there is no centralised source of truth.
By deploying cloud-based solutions, leaders can receive and share automatic, real-time updates on the latest inbound shipment inspection and quality levels. With facilities spread across countries, continents and time zones, the ability to monitor and trace any assembly, component or subassembly throughout the supply chain in real-time is more essential than ever, as noted by SelectHub.
One of the biggest challenges of a traditional supply chain management model is the potential difficulty in integrating systems to ensure that information is consistent and easily accessible throughout the enterprise. Managing teams across different locations, time zones and with varying degrees of responsibility will require the increased control and accountability that cloud-based technologies can create.
Cloud-based management
By accessing a complete view of supply chain activity across all factors, from sourcing to delivery, management will be able to adapt inventory, production and logistics as needed. This style of management by exception empowers leaders to focus on identifying and mitigating risks before they become costly problems
End-to-end scalability and agility gives teams more flexibility to respond to fluctuations in the market, and enables you to quickly deploy new services as needed. This promotes the outsourcing of management, maintenance and upgrades, to lower-cost locations without ever sufficing visibility.
This all means the time and resources spent on overhead activities can instead be allocated to investments in innovation and development. Across organisations, the utilisation of cloud-based technologies will empower management and improve productivity.
Deploying a cloud solution
For companies that have yet to embrace digital transformation, commonly cited sources for concern included the cost and potential security concerns associated with bringing supply chains into the cloud. However, by eliminating information silos through this technology, data and analytics can actually be structured to empower a proactive stance to risk rather than a reactive approach, reducing expenses in the long term.
If your organisation lacks the internal infrastructure to create, deploy and monitor a cloud-based system, BSM Global offers scalable solutions that are used by multinational organisations, large companies, small and medium-sized enterprises, and sole traders.
Our integrations can help you to better manage and grow your global trade, improve speed to market and reduce cost, while creating the visibility necessary in today’s modern market.
If you are ready to take the first steps to achieving cloud-enabled supply chain management, check out our software solutions page or contact our team today.