The Significance
Designing your Supply Chain, how to allocate value-add work amongst key suppliers, selecting suppliers, qualifying them, and negotiating component and value-added Manufacturing Services Agreements (MSAs) while creating supply chain management controls within your organization, is critical to a smooth, unencumbered supply of finished goods product that can scale ahead of demand.
The Effect
The result of a properly designed and constructed supply chain results in supply partnerships that support company scale demands, de-risks the likelihood of material shortages and outages, provides forward costing visibility and helps buffer against unplanned demands.
Key areas to be considered, addressed and serviced:
Designing a supply structure that meets your cost, order fulfillment & scalability needs
- Will you perform value-add work in-house, 100% outsourced or a mix
- Does your core product technology require custom parts, commercially available off the shelf, or a blend of both
- How will you generate demand signals to your suppliers, what systems do they have in place to seamlessly receive information, and can they effortlessly meet all your demands or need to invest in capital, people and space
- Have you assessed your supply chain risk profile and built in redundancy and diversification
Qualifying Individual Suppliers
- How to prepare for and perform site audits using a comprehensive pre-audit questionnaire
- Negotiating component supply agreements and value-add service contracts (MSA’s) with contract manufacturers and specialty suppliers
- How to negotiate contract T’s & C’s that give you assurance of supply while incentivizing your suppliers to support your business growth over time.
Creating the appropriate ongoing management controls that keeps both sides engaged, minimizes surprises, and allows the best of each party’s capabilities to shine
- Establishing individual and team responsibilities, accountabilities, and methods to exchange timely and actionable information
An effective supply chain model delineates total product costs, isolates supply chain risks, facilitates collaboration between you and your suppliers, creates an environment that welcomes diversity of opinions, and provides the means to adjust your supply chain as new information becomes available (from within your organization, customers or suppliers).
Lets discuss what you are concerned about. I can answer one-off questions or design a comprehensive supply chain model.
