Looking For A Supply Chain Consulting Partner, Make Sure You Are Aware Of These Facts
As supply chain is the crucial part of any business, business heads want to enhance supply chain efficiency for maximum deliverables. To achieve this, as a decision-maker, you may face difficulties across the supply chain. Undoubtedly, there are too many loopholes, which need fixation to cut down the losses, but they are not taken care of. In such a situation, CEOs need supply chain experts (consultants) for identifying loopholes and their rectifications.
Randomly choosing supply chain consultant can be a business hazard and may trigger wastage of your time as well as money. Therefore, to avoid these situations, these 4 crucial facts must be checked while selecting the most suitable supply chain consultant for your business –
a. Is your supply chain consultant capable enough to implement solution at the ground level?
When you approach the supply chain consultants for your business, they may give you an impression regarding their expertise in your product range. They may even prepare a solution and a beautiful roadmap to implement. However, you must keep in mind that your supply chain consultant must be prudent in managing end to end supply chain optimization. Selection criteria must include their ability to go deep down to the roots at each step of the problem and find out critical pain areas. This will be a precursor to an elaborated solution they will come up with because of having studied all the issues across the supply chain.
b. Process expertise and references
Does your prospective supply chain consulting partner possess the expertise which they claim? You must make a thorough reference check if they have worked on the similar project earlier. Do they have the prior experience of similar technology, processes and tools which are to be used in your assignment? Make sure that you check the references (they provide to you) and ask the key questions like satisfaction rate, timeline schedules, cost fluctuation and deliverables related to the project.
c. Check their past and present partners
This point will present the best picture in front of you since great work done for any of the customers by your potential supply chain consultant will fetch them higher no. of projects. Due to their satisfactory work, the past customers will come back with more assignments and will refer other businesses as well. It is simple to conclude that there must be some additional value the supply chain consultant is bringing to the table of the customers. This brings the confidence and there should be no hesitation in choosing such a supply chain consultant.
d. Professional Team
Every project is unique and requires certain head count and professional skills to complete it on time. Some unprofessional supply chain consultants may falsely portray the picture of mapping high no. of skilled manpower in the proposal which might not be the reality. To save costs, they may put less skilled or contract-based resources rather than committed professionals. This may prove to be a bottleneck for your project because of the higher risk of contractual resources leaving the project in between making it tough for you. Also, the deployed manpower may not have sufficient experience to bring value to the table. Hence, CEOs must keep a continuous check on the project and the resources for successful outcome and completion.
Consequently, alignment with a supply chain consulting provider is tricky and only the best-fit should be identified to make your project successful. CEOs must check these 4 key points before they make the move of settling on any supply chain consulting provider. Thorough research and taking these steps wisely would prove to be a better step in the long run.
Holisol is a leading supply chain organization providing solutions in retail (end-to-end fulfillment), Auto & Engineering (packaging & supply chain) and Consulting. Holisol works on the value proposition of Design-Implement-Manage to offer customers an experience of working like their own extended team, with affordable strategic and operational expertise.
Headquartered in Delhi, Holisol has a workforce of +300 supply chain enthusiasts who are continuously building value through leadership, innovation and relationships. For more information visits us at www.holisollogistics.com or email us at [email protected]
