Supply Chain Executives are struggling with capacities that are unavailable, dramatically increasing costs and complexities, and organization conflicts as to how to solve these problems.  Product shortages, port backlogs, transportation capacity issues are building inflationary headwinds and driving actions that will have a “Bull Whip” impact that will bite into bottom line earnings.

Supply Chain Executives and their organizational counterparts must approach this problem by focusing on the 4 C’s: lowering the need for Capacity, driving the reduction of Costs, simplifying operational Complexities and adopting a common guiding light to deflate organizational Conflict.

The key to accomplishing this is a foundation of trusted Cost-to-Serve (CTS) and Net Landed Profit (NLP) performance insights by Product, Customer, Channel and Store.  Having this specific financial performance information enables the pinpointing of opportunities to prioritize the use of resources and actions to protect the servicing of your most profitable customers, stores and channels and not allocating supply chain resources with a “one Size fits all” strategy. 

Case in Point – by identifying the CTS and NLP for all Products being sold to all Customers, one company found the following opportunities by having performance visibility on Unprofitable Products being sold to Unprofitable Customers.  They found multiple ways to reduce capacity requirements, lower costs and the complexity of the operation.  Below are specific examples:

4 C’s	One Example Focusing On	Total System-Wide Impact
Capacity	Reducing Inventory Carrying Cost	(28%)
Cost	Reducing Transportation Costs	(21%)
Complexity	Reducing Product Sourcing	(26%)
Conflict	Profit Improvement	146%

 

The resources being freed up can then be focused on prioritizing service to the Customers, Products, Channels and Stores based on their contributions to the profitable performance for the company.  Equally important, they could gain internal support for these actions by have a direct measurement on the impact that these actions could have on the bottom line for the company.