The individual supply chain
We have now grown from mass production in the sixties and seventies to an individualized supply chain
“The customer can choose any color, as long as it is black.” The winged statement of Henry Ford. How different the world is today. The consumer penetrates deeply into the supply chain with his wishes and requirements.
From the standard car to the personalized supply chain. Powered by advanced technology, mobile devices and Cloud solutions on the internet. Every time a consumer purchases a product or service, an individual supply chain is created that ensures that the product / service configuration is completely customized. The customer achieves this through technological applications that enable order specification and enforce chain visibility when it comes to availability and distribution points.
This development requires that the most important business processes grow in time and respond to customer behavior. Forecasting, Planning and Execution. Physical resources such as warehouses, transport, employees and production that ensure that the correct quantities are present at the correct distribution points. This means that the correct picking and fulfillment takes place within the supply chain in response to customer demand.
Planning in the form of distribution, production and channel-driven distribution should ensure a dynamic process in which all stock points are connected and ensure a dynamic delivery to the consumption point.
Forecasting is a real-time process in which the development of customer demand and behavior is continuously analyzed and thus lays the foundation for reliable planning and execution of the delivery process.
Profitable supply chains are then only possible if these processes are optimally coordinated. Organizations that still have partitions between these processes would do well to integrate these functions as soon as possible. The responsiveness of your organization depends on it. And with that the extent to which one can meet a volatile customer demand.
