Does your service offering is REALLY designed to serve the better or the best? Probably either one. Advisor-business owners: Read this article before you make next move to help in your journey ahead!
To improve upon competitive capabilities, firms need to understand how manufacturing and supply chain service operations should be designed to better support market requirements. The interrelationships between product characteristics, supply chain design, process choice and the design of manufacturing planning and control principles is a complex problem generating increasing interest in today's industry. Building a supply chain in service industry is about making partnerships.
Postponement to Improve Supply chain Responsiveness
The high-tech industry has one of the most complex supply chains due to the growing level of configuration required for consumer electronics. Consider the following product categories each of which require different configurations for individual countries or consumer categories:
Broadband - Primarily sold for home use through local telecommunications service providers. Each provider will have unique requirements for firmware configurations, branded packaging and instruction manuals to support their service offerings.
Consumer Software - Publishers are offering more variations of each software application to service different price points and consumer needs. External packaging, instruction manuals and product warranties vary based upon the country of sale and the software version.
How to in a - Service value Offering?
Service delivery system can be viewed as a chain or network of activities, which involves number of participants. Just like supply chain in manufacturing, in services also all the participants are related to each other. The objective of achieving efficiency and or responsiveness is equally important and relevant in the whole network of participants involved in delivery service called service supply chain.
Value Proposition Drivers
Solutions that are value driven and helps business smooth their business operations are the primary objectives for functioning and key for any business. For any automation, service companies must figure out those value drivers for the clients that gives them more value potential and run for their money. Technology solution must be driven to focus those as the primary blocks to build on as an extension for connected projects to the pipeline. These are those attributes that increase the value of a service by improving the perception of the deliverable and providing a competitive advantage to the customers on a long term. Supply Chain solution offerings that focus more on value creation than cost.
Outcome-Driven
Are you looking to have cost reduction, responsiveness, security, sustainability, resilience, or innovation? What are you looking at, think about it -?
In an era where future is uncertain, service supply chains should be focused to be more resilient and Agile. Responsiveness and agility to overcome quickly and make the business to function even during major disruptions is vital in the world which we all are living today and at a time when industry is hit with Covid crisis and disruptions. Supply chains that are cost driven but operating solely on that model would be out thrown by competitors during these turbulent times. If you need the supply chain to be responsive and agile then solely focusing on cost driven outcome chain can cause companies to fail and overcome to operate during disruptions.
Embracing Disruptive Innovation
In an era where we see more startups growing and outgrowing themselves with new technologies and innovative thinking; it's because they are able to provide the solutions which the customer would need not acquire to have it today but targeting those new segments in the market which would be something that the customers and firms would like to embrace and accept in future to come. And this is the reason why we see established companies in the market failing to compete with the new disruptions in their mainstream segments. Companies feel reluctant to divert their resources from established set of market to a new market segment. Startups focus on the emerging markets and are able to reap the competitive advantage before even the established service companies start to realize the true value potential. Companies that focus to keeping sustaining technologies separate from disruptive innovation market segments are the ones that can strive to think out of box and be competitive.
Advance Analytics for Strategy and Process Thinking
Artificial intelligence and machine learning with Big data analytics can help business to inform and optimize design choices with cognitive thinking making humans smarter with planning and decision-making process faster and more efficient. With Blockchain technology and Big data, supply chain analytics can be more proactive and responsive that help business to get a wholesome picture of each entity within the service supply chain to realize the solutions that can be customized and tailored for the customer needs. Big Data techniques can help in extracting hidden valuable knowledge from these nodes spread across their extended supply chain entities. Blockchain technology can help connect people across supply networks and with smart contracts where we see future transactions taking place. With companies slowly moving towards investing into the blockchain market as we have seen with Tesla and other companies the future of business transactions and tracking lies behold.
This shift in emphasis is driven by technology advancement in data stream approach and a massive increase in the volume of data available and floating within business entities. Data analytics and machine learning tools elucidate the structure and performance of supply chains as never before. Today's network method optimizations techniques highlight the complexities of relationships between trading partners and third parties. Big data analytics is playing a vital role in improving this process within the chain and resolves several pain points at strategic, operational, and tactical levels with varied SaaS based tools and approaches. It ranges from improving delivery times to identifying ways to reduce the communication gap between downstream and upstream. Analytics reports enable decision-makers to achieve operational efficiency and monitor performance to improve productivity. Supply chain analytics augment data-driven decisions to reduce costs and improve service levels.
Creating a Sustainable Solution
Systems and solutions that are focused to help business in their operations to be more sustainable in execution helps improve their bottom line. With technologies like Big data and tracking technologies solutions that track the wastage of material that happens at each node within the business operations chain right from origin to point of sale, it can help customers to be lean in approach with reduced wastage and a green sustainable environment. This one is outset of the factory wastage and carbon emissions topic which the traditional supply chain companies tries to eliminate to operate for a green environment. Sustainable practices and solutions are more relevant at times of global disruptions and pandemic where health and safety are more of a concern as it has always been.
Enterprise Business systems Innovation with Cloud Transformation
On premise systems to Cloud Migration. Switching to a cloud-based ERP, supply chain systems, CRM, data-storage, and network-infrastructure is helping business to be more competitive and drive value driven results for their customers with cost efficiency. Drawing from a single set of enterprise data in the cloud, companies now can continuously plan and forecast to make intelligent decisions. With AI, machine learning, and predictive intelligence, companies can intelligently anticipate and plan for what comes next.
This creates new insights that help improve supply chain decision-making, all the way from the improvement of front-line operations, to strategic choices, such as the selection of the right supply chain operating models and right supply chain for the product or service.
Feedback and Learning
Learning with Agility, this should be a continuous drive to focus on the above drivers. Learning comes from the data and information that has been collected for each customer segments based on their business and solution offering. The feedback should be a continuous loop with the right reporting tools to show the metrics of performance. Customer ERP data source systems collectively with CRM data should allow to get information related to the customer segmentation and value approaches that has gained the improvements in the service offerings over a period and areas for improvement for prospective up selling and moving the customers from one segment to another for higher success engagement.
Written By - Sumesh Menon
