Supply Chain Management

It is no easy feat to manage a supply chain that transports hundreds or thousands of Stock Keeping Units ( SKUs ) from various plants to customers across a nation or around the globe. Supply Chain ManagementMeanwhile, each organization must coordinate supplies from a distributed supplier network and superimpose the objectives of reducing inventory while maintaining customer delivery service performance. The feat then becomes a challenge.

Our Approach

Supply chain management is the process of planning, implementing, and controlling operations of the supply chain while satisfying customer requirements as efficiently as possible. The process includes all internal functions, the logistics, distribution, sourcing, customer service, sales, manufacturing, and finance departments of an organization. However, it also involves external suppliers that provide finished products, components, parts and assemblies, and their delivery.

When a company has questionable supply chain management optimization, one or more of the following problems most likely exists:

  • The distribution network: Poorly located suppliers, production facilities, distribution centers, and/or warehouses
  • The distribution strategy: Centralized versus decentralized, direct shipping, pull or push strategy, third party logistics
  • Inventory management: Excess quantity and/or various locations of raw materials, works-in-process, and finished goods
  • Information management: Unaligned processes and information systems that involved planning, forecasting, inventory, and transportation
  • Company culture and structure: An organization with horizontal silos and internal goals working against optimal processes

Getting the right goods to the right place at the right time requires the integration of supply chain business processes and the collaboration of buyers and suppliers, joint product development, common systems, and shared information.

Thomas Group's solutions provide clients with cost savings, service enhancements, productivity gains, and increased profits. Our approach focuses on these key supply chain management processes:

  • Customer Service: Delivery information and real-time product availability to customers that are integrated with your company’s production and distribution operations
  • Strategic Procurement: Building a company-supplier, win-win environment that supports rapid communication about all activities, including negotiation, order placement, supplier scheduling coordination, supply continuity, inbound transportation, and storing and handling quality
  • Supplier Connectivity and Order Fulfillment: Providing the finished product or service to customers and seamlessly linking your company’s marketing effort all the way through customer service
  • Manufacturing Flow: Studying all activities relating to planning, scheduling, and supporting manufacturing operations, including storage, handling, inventory optimization, and logistics. All activities must be flexible, linked, and operating at consistent levels to provide a manufacturing flow process that improves speed (shorter cycle times), responsiveness (just-in-time delivery), and customer demand response efficiency (on-time delivery)
  • Portfolio Management: Product development and commercialization that expedites the development and launching of appropriate new and qualit products with shortened product life cycles in more succient time schedules concurrent with the discontinuation of existing lower-profit products
  • Sales Cycle Efficiency: Measuring overall sales and marketing effectiveness using metrics, knowing that prospect conversion rates and speed determine your company’s sales cycle efficiency

Thomas Group has industry experience in supply chain transformation across multiple enterprises, including automotive, white goods, consumer goods, retail, machine tools, aerospace and defense, and many others. Our pragmatic, performance-oriented approach enables us to identify key improvement opportunities and deliver tangible results quickly. Solutions may range from simple, rapid adjustments in inventory levels or delivery performance to more profound change such as enhancement of the entire supply chain as a global competitive weapon.

Components of Supply Chain Management

Well-defined and aligned processes and procedures increase supply chain program efficiency, enabling Breakthrough Performance. Thomas Group’s solutions focus on process to improve results, whether focused on a single activity or an entire enterprise. Supply chain solutions address: