Many SME’s struggle with identifying and releasing Quick Wins for immediate benefit and financial returns. The key is to identify the most important supply chain strategic options, and ensure they are aligned to corporate strategy. Then, depending on the corporate strategy and the current performance of the supply chain, the diagnosis is focused to identify and release the Quick Win initiatives for immediate benefits and financial return.
Some of the critical questions to ask are:
- Where are the bottle necks/problems associated with the acquisition process?
- What can be done to improve warehouse throughput and productivity?
- What is the cost structure of the warehousing operation?, and
- What are the major cost components of the warehouse variable and fixed costs, and how do these cost components compare to internal and external benchmarks?
Drilling down to the root of these questions will assist in the qualification of the areas of improvements, the associated financial benefits, and the development of the action items by which these benefits will be realized.
The Implementation Roadmap resulting from the assessment will thereby define the Baseline Operation and Financial Performance Metrics (please see The Bottom Line!!! for more details) against which the success of the recommended improvement initiatives will be measured during a subsequent audit.
The chart below summarizes our Three Step Approach identifying and releasing Quick Win Initiatives for immediate benefits and financial return.
John Hare is a Supply Chain Executive working in Toronto.