More than ever, the public's attention is fixated on the supply chain they have historically taken for granted. According to Google Trends, interest in web searches for "supply chain" are nearly double that of any point in the last 5 years. The past two years have been defined by uncertainty and disruption. With increased focus on supply chains, the pressure is greater than ever for sourcing professionals to be aware of supplier capacity and ensure materials can be secured amid uncertainty.
Adopting the right supplier management software system can be the difference between damaging your bottom line by alienating customers and converting long-term customers by delivering your products on schedule. But the ideal outcome is dependent on how quickly you can deploy that solution.
Many challenges facing today's supply chain leaders
Supply chain disruptions are sometimes unavoidable, however being unprepared for one is inexcusable. Nearly 40% of sourcing professionals are rendered unable to adapt quickly to changes in their supply chain due to dependence on manual processes. This is further complicated by the use of multiple, disconnected systems of record and exacerbated by a lack of visibility into supplier insights required to adjust operation.
These challenges aren't novel, however. Businesses' inability to gain visibility into their suppliers have impacted the delivery goods to customers and increased operational costs and risk for years. What is new though is how severely these shortcomings are affecting supply chains and consumers' immediate expectations for resolution. Resolutions adopted in the past require extensive effort by experienced coders and take months to stand-up. The solution is not merely about creating agile systems or surfacing transparency in your supply chain. It is about having an actionable supplier management solution as soon as possible. Quickbase's agility platform allows supplier management professionals to stand up their own flexible solutions in days and conquer their supply chain concerns rapidly.
What is Quickbase?
Quickbase is an operational agility platform that enables organizations to solve their own supply chain pain points with flexible, easy-to-create workflows. Instead of the months that most supplier management software systems take to develop, code, and deploy, Quickbase supply chain solutions are ready for launch within days. Quickbase grants users the ability to automate complex processes and create a centralized repository for data from existing, disparate systems to be collected.
Construct a resilient supply chain faster
Crafting a disruption-proof supply chain begins with adopting workflow automation and prioritizing visibility in your supplier management system. As disruption has become the norm within supply chain management, the speed at which problems can be addressed is as critical as the solutions themselves. Adopting a system for automating workflows cannot take longer than the manual processes they are replacing. Deeply entrenched core systems have valuable data contained in them, so surfacing necessary insight readily and rapidly is the ideal state. It isn’t a pipedream. Manufacturing organizations of all sizes are turning major supplier roadblocks into advantages over competitors in less than a few weeks leveraging Quickbase.
For a large, international equipment manufacturing company, rapid implementation of custom-made applications was essential for supply chain efficiency in the face of overwhelming disruption. To deal with the crisis in a global environment where every supply chain is different, the company needed complex, tailor-made applications that could be developed in hours.
In a matter of days, an international manufacturing leader stood up a suite of applications to gain visibility into their supply chain, manufacturing status, and high priority orders. Among other things, these applications leveraged Quickbase Connections to centralize critical data from existing systems and surface real-time updates from suppliers and Quickbase Insights for customized dashboards and transparency into supplier performance metrics.
"Things are evolving daily, but the great thing about Quickbase is it doesn't take days to build stuff. The speed that we’re able to implement these new changes and new workflows is very, very important to us," said the Internal Sales & Global Process Systems Manager & Global Quickbase Admin for this large manufacturer.
