Within the Supply Chain Management sector of your organization, the way your supply chain business processes are being executed is the key to whether your Supply Chain Management initiatives succeed. Companies should be aiming to make their supply chain operations as efficient and cost-effective as possible to be able to deliver customer value and give them a competitive advantage across oversaturated marketspaces.  

A company’s supply chain initiatives consist of different stages, which all contain different processes for stage execution to drive complete supply chain operational excellence. These stages lead into another, so if your processes are not being executed in a timely and accurate fashion, it produces a domino effect within all the steps of your Supply Chain Management, therefore causing an explosion in entire operation, leaving your customers very unsatisfied. To prevent this from happening, it is very important to implement a BPM software to control, manage, visualize, and analyze your supply chain processes, therefore preventing the worst from happening. A process-focused approach to SCM is instrumental.  

The stages of Supply Chain Management are:   

• Planning to operate at maximum efficiency  

• Sourcing to procure raw materials from vendors  

• Manufacturing Goods- assembling, packaging, and refining  

• Delivering Goods 

• Returning Goods to Vendor  

Within these different stages and departments, multiple complex business processes are living and happen from the time a raw material is produced, until the finished product is distributed to your end customers. Within that timeframe, there is a substantial amount that can go wrong.  

Bringing in a BPM software to your SCM operations will help you: 

• Match demand with supply by optimizing your planning  

• A BPM Platform allows you to optimize the processes that optimally generate and shape demand in conjunction with supply capabilities, by linking marketing and sales to optimize demand-gen activities.  

• Find vendors in your ecosystem to provide goods and services efficiently  

• A BPM Platform streamlines vendor search processes to make sure vendors are being completed in a short amount of time.  

• Optimize the assembling, testing, and packaging of goods  

• Utilize a BPM platform to visualize the connections between assembling, testing, and packaging processes and identify changes necessary for increasing efficiency.  

• Accelerate the delivery time between you (the vendor) to your customer  

• A sustainable BPM platform aims to reduce your delivery business processes down to the minimum number of processes, with the least number of steps possible for each to ensure success. These condensed ways of working remove delivery deviations, reduce variance, and minimize the time spent working, therefore accelerating your delivery time.  

• Clarify the post-delivery customer support process 

• A BPM platform envisions the sets of customer service expectations for long term and eliminates the redundancy. 

• Receive feedback from customers to optimize bottlenecks  

• A BPM platform visualizes and improves customer service processes to ensure customer feedback is being handled efficiently and executed properly. These processes can run with maximum output and minimum resources.  

It is important to visualize and map all the different data points that are being captured along the operation through BPM, so those inconsistencies and bottlenecks can be found and improved to achieve the above. By having a SCM process blueprint, your organization can have a reference that ties together your systems, your data, and your processes to track all relevant information, so you can anticipate demand and be more proactive about fixing some of the challenges and mitigate the risks involved in your SCM. Having the right technologies that integrate with an efficient BPM platform can provide both internal and external knowledge to help you make better decisions and help you manage your supply chain better.  

There are so many benefits to combining BPM and SCM. The automated and streamlined nature of a sustainable BPM, which is properly implemented, allows more to be done with less. Without a BPM software, employees are heavily responsible for manually monitoring processes and passing any decisions through a hierarchy of authorized personas, which takes a lot of time to complete and ensure accuracy. BPM allows for an automation of the decision-making process. This automation makes it possible for decisions to be made quickly and consistently within a predetermined set of parameters. Work takes less time to complete, and products are developed and brought to the supply chain more quickly and accurately, as these processes are now automated and centralized.  

Sustainable BPM aims to reduce business processes down to the minimum number of processes, with the least number of steps possible for each to ensure success. The number of links between employees is reduced, and therefore the chance of costly mistakes being made is minimized. The reduction in the number of processes, and steps within those processes, reduces the chance of any blurring or confusion between roles or responsibilities. Employee accountability becomes clearer where mistakes can easily be tracked to their source, allowing for the quick diagnosis and rectification of any weak spots in SCM processes.  

With mistakes being minimized, employees being held accountable, costs being reduced, decisions and operations being accelerated, and clarity in employee initiatives, customers are highly going to be satisfied with the speed at which products and services are delivered at all stages of the supply chain. In today’s fast moving digital world, especially post-Corona, people have gotten used to speedy service and have little patience for any delays. 

Using Process Mining within your Supply Chain Management: 

As SCM has evolved through data, there are various opportunities to apply process mining in the field of supply chain. By using a process mining tool, a process is visualized automatically by looking at the log files of your systems of execution. Through log file data, you can analyze customers ordering behavior and discover that 45% of all orders have last minute changes, which thereby affects your total supply chain and implies higher costs. With process mining capabilities, you can aggregate overviews of classical KPI dashboarding, and dive into each individual case to find potential commonalities and potential root causes of your bottlenecks. Improvement initiatives that are implemented based on analysis in your supply chain can be measured afterwards to analyze if the initiatives implemented have reached their expected ROI. On the other hand, these initiatives can be steered while implementing to decrease the failure rate. 

Process mining is a valuable technique in supply chain management as it provides insights into the actual flow of materials, information, and funds across the supply chain. By analyzing the data generated during the execution of processes, process mining can help identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and opportunities for improvement in the supply chain. It can also help detect and prevent fraud and compliance violations, improve supply chain transparency, and enhance collaboration among different stakeholders in the supply chain. Overall, process mining can enable supply chain managers to make data-driven decisions, optimize their processes, and achieve better performance and customer satisfaction.  

Process mining can help identify process improvement opportunities in the following key areas of supply chain management: 

1. Lead time reduction: Process mining can help identify bottlenecks and delays in the supply chain processes and suggest ways to reduce lead times. 

2. Resource optimization: By analyzing the utilization of resources such as inventory, machines, and labor, process mining can help optimize their usage and reduce waste. 

3. Cost reduction: Process mining can help identify and eliminate unnecessary activities or steps in the supply chain processes that add cost without adding value. 

4. Quality improvement: Process mining can help identify patterns of defects or errors in the supply chain processes and suggest ways to improve quality. 

5. Forecast accuracy improvement: By analyzing the historical data, process mining can help identify patterns and trends that can be used to improve the accuracy of demand and sales forecasts. 

6. Compliance improvement: Process mining can help detect and prevent compliance violations by identifying deviations from standard operating procedures and suggesting ways to improve compliance. 

Automate. Accelerate. Improve. Visualize. Reduce.  

Utilizing an effective BPM platform in your SCM can help you be the vendor to deliver the fastest, most consistent service, luring customers away from their less efficient rivals and ensuring repeat spenders.  

Interested in using a BPM Platform for your Supply Chain Management initiatives?  

Request a demo here