By first understanding the impact on your customers, demand profiles and taking a 12 – 18 - month view of the business, Tight Lines can help you create scenarios for an alternative manufacturing and distribution network.  This could include re-shoring operations closer to customers and shortening your supply chain.  While these solutions can create wins for your customers, there are often ripple effects of making these decisions.

What is the impact on your supply base?

Is there adequate labor and skills to meet our requirements?

What are the implications of tariffs and other import/export factors?

What is the impact of my information flow for planning, procurement, and fulfillment processes?

While creating a closer supply chain geographically may sound very appealing, there are many process and service implications to making such a change.  

COVID-19 may have been the trigger to make this assessment, but this could be an opportunity to take stock and look for ongoing cost reduction opportunities in an uncertain environment.

Your sourcing strategy has likely been driven by technical product requirements, factory locations and other industry factors (i.e. limited capacity).  When these factors create dependencies and potential single point of failure scenarios, it is time to assess the risk of your supply base, not just from a supply perspective, but also a financial one.

Tight Lines can help you document and evaluate your supply sources for your most critical commodities, co-create alternatives and strategies to mitigate your risk.

This is an opportunity to evaluate your procurement practices from sourcing process, contract engagement, cost, quality, regulatory requirements, and other key risk management areas.

During this time, has your key planning processes been able to source the data you need and understand the impact on your business quickly?  Or Have you been bogged down by the manual data crunching so typical in many organizations?

Have you been able to quickly assess the impact on inventory, factory capacity, fulfillment due to the increased uncertainty in demand and supply?

Have you been able to have robust discussions cross functionally with a fresh data set that everyone can support?

Visibility of data across your supply chain is critical in normal times, having gaps in your ability to quickly understand the impact of sudden demand or supply changes can create a gap in decision making.

If you are having challenges with data management and overall demand/supply planning processes like scenario planning and SO&P, Tight Lines can help you with a complete business process assessment and recommend changes that will enable a responsive information supply chain process.