Enhancing effectiveness and cost efficiency across supply chains remains an imperative for productive businesses. Efficient supply chain management should be regarded as an organizational cornerstone that drastically improves inventory reduction and positively affects costs, project management, and customer service.

Advantages to supply chain collaboration

For retailers, there’s a significant operational advantage to adopting clever in-house collaboration that also includes smart collaboration with external suppliers and partners. But implementing powerful vertically integrated collaboration is a challenge for organizations, particularly when having to account for factors such as ever-changing business landscapes and complexities.

Internally, companies are able to successfully manage their supply chain when they’re aware of their operations, their business needs and risks, and the variety of scenarios that may arise.

But when external collaborators are added to the equation, it becomes a whole different ballgame. Unforeseen challenges, differing implementation standards, and organizational diversity are all factors that have to be taken into account. This is especially true for retailers that operate on thin profit margins and therefore have to curtail costs and integrate product handling, storage, and logistics capabilities.

Implementing supply chain collaboration

Effective implementation and collaboration across supply chains is necessary in providing businesses with a competitive advantage. Implementing supply-chain management systems can reduce overhead costs, enabling the adoption of systematic approaches to such issues from product quality to order reversal. Supply-chain collaboration facilitates retailers to reduce unexpected risks, implement systematic approaches, and establish measurable processes that enhance performance… and the bottom line.

Strategies for enhancing efficient supply chain collaboration

The following are key strategies that organizations can adopt to enhance efficient supply chain collaboration:

• Understand and accept that collaboration is hard—especially when scaling. Small companies are particularly at risk when they overstretch their capabilities and fail to inject the right resources into the right projects and processes.

• Businesses should base their choice of partners on the business goals and future decisions they may face. For retailers, collaboration is typically based on goals to improve supply, distribution, demand, and sales processes. Don’t undermine the importance of choosing the right partnerships, which can create a shared vision between collaborators.

• Collaboration should be built on shared information, capabilities, strategic goals, value, and success-orientation. Employees must overcome differing organizational cultures, mindsets, and ways of communication. Shared goals, vision, and communication create engagement and trust.

• Collaborative partnerships should invest in the right technological tools and train their human capital to facilitate the adoption of new processes and ease collaboration.

• In supply chain collaboration, it’s vital to form a strong joint performance management system while focusing on common targets, as well as continuously monitoring progress and results. Teams collaborating together have to keep work simple and regularly review goals and address challenges.

• Aim for long-term collaboration between partners. For a partnership to last, collaboration is built on long-term goals, a clear understanding, and defined expectations.

• Ensure collaborators are taking the right actions to capture any available wins for the collaboration to deliver value at as quickly as possible.

Finally, organizations should never lose sight of creating value for customers, owners, investors, and employees. Optimizing supply chain collaboration is an important way of doing this. It allows companies to keep customer satisfaction at the forefront of their businesses so they can improve, develop, and innovate.