Resilience and Maturity

Want to grow your supply chain maturity and resilience but don’t know where to start? Unlocking opportunities in your supply chain requires growth, but first you need to know what changes to make and where.

The capability for agile and informed decision-making is what sets a mature supply chain apart, this is essential to building a resilient supply chain. Supply chain resilience future proofs your organisation for unexpected changes and opportunities for growth. In a recent Times supplement of which Olivehorse was a sponsor, the Times showed that in Shipping & Freight, only 14% of supply chains were able to adapt to the pandemic with no problem. 73% experienced delays and 8% shut down completely.

Determining your organisation’s maturity is a key step when creating an effective roadmap to drive maturity growth and, ultimately, build a resilient supply chain. The starting point is to map out as-is maturity. This means identifying the key strengths and weaknesses in your People, Process, Systems and Data (the Olivehorse pillars of supply chain excellence).This requires a conceptual framework of maturity and a clear picture of what good looks like. Getting this step right is essential to identifying areas for growth and setting an effective roadmap for improvement-determining easy wins in the short-term and determining the solutions and processes which will contribute towards your resilience in the future.

Conducting a maturity diagnosis starts with asking the right questions. The Olivehorse methodology uses an anonymous questionnaire to gauge perceptions of maturity within an organisation. This is an important step as internal perceptions of maturity provide good insight into beliefs and attitude, as well as highlighting key focus areas for the workshops and differences in perceptions between roles and departments. Our maturity diagnostic tool in SAC maps questionnaire results to our maturity framework, allowing you to explore the results in the context of supply chain maturity. Deep dive workshops go into detail on the successes and pain points of each business area. Points raised in workshops and external insights from Olivehorse consultants are combined into a comprehensive report.

Maturity Growth

Once there is a clear understanding of your supply chain maturity, the next step is to align on a roadmap for growth.

During the roadmap development, the improvement areas identified in the workshops are prioritised based on business benefit and the effort to implement. Based on the prioritisation and business Strategy the improvement initiatives are plotted on a timeline to outline the roadmap.

In general, best of breed technology and system improvements will go a long way to increasing System & Data maturity. Poorly functioning systems and messy data set the limits for what it is possible to achieve, even with an excellent team. Effective technology frees up planners from short term firefighting, creating time to focus everyday planning tasks and shorten time to productivity. Some of the tangible benefits include:

• Support Informed decision making and shorten planning cycle times with rapid Scenario planning capability.
• Take out wasted activity through automation.
• Evolve to a more encompassing solution, modelling key planning elements removing the need use other tools.
• Build standardisation in ways of working practices and core system functionality so it is easier to support and share information/ educate.
• Simplify/ reduce existing complexity by automating tasks making it easier to develop capability and enhance industry specific knowledge.
• Create a unified window for planning and analysis.
• Manage by exception using real-time alerts and analytics.
• Support the End-to-end process with a single version of the truth across all planning functions.

However, increasing maturity is not just as simple as having a good system. It also involves developing your organisation’s People and Process maturity. An agile implementation methodology, alongside user training & process design and support is key to success. During a system implementation, Olivehorse also deliver training and process support. The agile approach places ownership of technology in the hands of the business, driving user adoption.

Take the first steps to increasing maturity

As experts in supply chain, Olivehorse is uniquely positioned to provide insight into your current resilience and provide a roadmap to extend, enhance and transform your supply chain for the future. Our Healthcheck deep dives into your people, process, systems, and data to pave the way for end-to-end business excellence.

Our Jumpstart service creates a roadmap for short-, mid- and long-term improvements for your supply chain. Identifying easy wins in the short-term and recommending the solutions and processes will contribute towards your resilience in the future.

To start your journey on building supply chain maturity contact Olivehorse.