Building supply chain resilience

Challenge

Traditional supply chains built on scale and repeatability often compromise on adaptability. The Coronavirus pandemic exposed the major consequences of this lack of agility. Many businesses were unable to quickly reshape supply, reduce complexity, meet demand, control costs, or maximize sales.

Though disruption is not uncommon in supply chains, the recent pace, scale, and global nature of disruption is unprecedented. Here are some examples of the challenges that organizations have faced:

• Unexpected demand surges suddenly rendered existing forecasts obsolete
• Critical component shortages and interrupted supplies halted production lines
• Labor and travel restrictions posed major roadblocks for logistics and fulfillment operations
• A lack of e-commerce and omnichannel capabilities have blocked new routes to market
• Suppliers under financial strain could no longer hold inventory as they have in the past
• Retailers continued to enforce on-time and in-full (OTIF) fines and penalties
• New and more agile companies began to take market share from more established brands

Solution

We help our clients transform disconnected, rigid, and outdated processes into a hyperconnected supply chain. At its core, a hyperconnected supply chain builds upon a responsive architecture so business leaders can sense and respond to demand at speed and scale. By connecting data across the enterprise, supply chain leaders can spot risks sooner, have more visibility into the financial implications of decisions, and make decisions more quickly and with more confidence.

We tailor our supply chain solutions for the individual enterprise but build them with four common building blocks.

Forecasting-as-a-service: Increase forecast accuracy and improve process efficiency

Leading companies don't rely solely on historic and internal business data for forecasting. They're adding in external data to generate powerful, predictive insights. This approach – of combining market insights with artificial-intelligence-powered analytics – is part of our forecasting-as-a-service offering, which delivers earlier and clearer demand signals to help supply chain leaders act on insights at speed.

To get started, our experts will assess your current supply chain's maturity and develop a future-proof model for predicting demand. We'll also incorporate intelligent automation across your supply and demand planning processes, establish a forecasting center of excellence, develop a transformation roadmap, and introduce digital tools to underpin virtual collaboration and remote working. On average, our clients reduce forecasting errors by 18%.

Agile response framework: Tackle the challenges of volatile supply and demand

Our agile response frameworks use advanced analytics to identify demand patterns and trends to spot potential gaps in the demand plan and then deliver these insights in customizable dashboards. With this approach, demand prediction and capacity resetting become far easier to manage. Some of the benefits we've achieved for our clients include:

• 35% increase in planner efficiency
• 20–30% increase in labor productivity
• 40–60% reduction in expediting costs

Control tower: Simplify supply chains for end-to-end visibility and agility

Genpact's control tower solution supports long-term resilience by enhancing supply chain agility and flexibility. It serves as the central hub for planning and execution, improving governance by integrating business processes and synchronizing your global supply chain.

For end-to-end visibility, the control tower aggregates data in real time across every component of the supply chain to create a single source of truth. Using real-time demand-sensing capabilities and predictive analytics, we deliver actionable insights to ensure you can proactively respond to changing market conditions and sudden disruptions. We'll also introduce automation to streamline your workflows and increase response speed. We've completed over 70 successful control tower implementations for global enterprises. Results include:

• 10–30% reduction in working capital
• 10–20% improvement in OTIF
• 5–10% reduction in logistics costs
• 20–30% reduction in waste and obsolescence

Network design: Reduce risk, optimize service, and control costs

Genpact's network design solution reimagines your supply chain to connect strategy, network footprint, infrastructure, and technologies. We'll help you minimize internal and external risk, maximize customer service levels, and keep costs down. Network design improves demand planning, inventory management, supply insights, and order fulfillment. Some of the benefits we've achieved include:

• Improving forecast accuracy from 40–60% to 75–87%
• Reducing overall inventory by 30%
• Boosting OTIF performance from 75%to 91%
• Cutting costs by 10–20%

Impact

Genpact's supply chain resilience solutions enhance visibility, agility, and ultimately create a hyperconnected supply chain that is flexible and future proof. We've already put these solutions into practice for enterprises across a range of industries.

Future-proof forecasting

A leading manufacturer needed to completely realign its existing sales and operations planning (S&OP) process and improve forecast accuracy. By leveraging forecasting-as-a-service across its supply chain, the company has developed a new and improved S&OP process that incorporates accurate monthly statistical forecasts from advanced analytics. As a result, the manufacturer realized a $53 million reduction in inventory in just two months.

Actionable assessments

A global healthcare product manufacturer was facing challenges from a complicated logistics network and high delivery costs. Genpact performed a diagnostic to identify optimal warehouse facilities to reduce overall fulfillment, handling charges, and transportation costs. By reducing the number of warehouses across its logistics network, the company has saved $6.6 million in associated costs.

Genpact designs its supply chain resilience solutions to help your business not only survive – but also thrive. Using our tried and tested solutions, which have helped global enterprises across every industry, your business will emerge stronger than ever before thanks to a resilient and hyperconnected supply chain.