Brands and retailers have always needed software capabilities that boost agility—helping them accelerate decision making, respond to consumer demand, and keep suppliers funded. But as a global pandemic makes collaboration more difficult, elasticity and agility are becoming a key factor in the supply chain’s ability to recover—and that includes internal sourcing and finance teams. More than ever, supply chains need to adapt to different methods for conducting sourcing.
In this video, Sourcing Journal founder and president Edward Hertzman and Infor president and head of Americas Rod Johnson discuss what it takes to remain resilient through the coronavirus pandemic. Not only do businesses need to understand risk exposure across their supply networks, they need to ensure that they’re prepared to deal with those risks as they come. They need to digitize sourcing and supplier collaboration to enable flexibility; to rotate the supply base to deal with regionalized issues or black swans; to ensure liquidity across suppliers to maintain assurance of supply.
Rod shares the story of Deckers Brands, a leading footwear designer and distributor based in Goleta, Calif. Deckers was challenged with time-intensive manual processes for order fulfillment and supply-chain planning. Through the company’s implementation of Infor Nexus, Deckers achieved a more streamlined system for automating and integrating supply and demand data into one real-time view that uses machine learning to proactively identify inventory shortage issues.
Since deployment, the team can more quickly find issues and execute solutions, which has helped streamline decision-making, minimize fulfillment disruptions, reduce overall inventory, and ultimately improve customer confidence in the brand. With Infor Nexus, Deckers has made 99 percent of invoices non-discrepant, injected capital into the supply chain and reduced distribution center receiving time by 50 percent. By virtually eliminating paper processes, their teams can work from one version of the data, and easily identify and resolve issues efficiently.
Download the best practice guide for more information on how businesses can make their supply chains more conducive to agile collaboration.