Does your firm operate in a dynamic environment where constant change threatens to erode the efficiency and effectiveness of your supply chain? To minimize this slow, steady cost increase and service deterioration, firms must quickly adapt to change that occurs in and around their supply chains. Chainalytics helps its clients react effectively to this change and capitalize on the benefits of improved strategic and tactical decision-making through its Continuous Analysis approach.
Many firms approach these complex problems armed only with management intuition and crude spreadsheet analysis. This results in oversimplified solutions that offer sub optimal results or even erroneous recommendations. At Chainalytics, we help clients avoid these mistakes by applying advanced decision sciences to complex strategic and tactical decisions. Over the past 15 years, our consultants have refined our Continuous Analysis approach, successfully identifying billions of dollars in improvements. This three-phase approach enables clients to persistently evaluate supply chain performance and thus reduce total cost, enhance customer service distinction, and accelerate profitability:
- Phase 1: Analyse - Identify and evaluate current strategies, policies, and supply chain cost and service drivers.
- Phase 2: Optimise - Analyse alternatives to minimize cost and risk, enhance service levels, and accelerate profits.
- Phase 3: Realize - Implement the optimal operating strategies, constantly monitor for any supply chain deterioration, and analyse and measure success.
Phase One: Analyse
Within our Continuous Analysis approach, Chainalytics helps a client understand its supply chain challenges and opportunities. By transforming a client's business into an analytical framework, Chainalytics evaluates all relevant scenarios for improvement, such as changes to infrastructure, inventory policies, or trading partners. To effectively analyse each supply chain decision, Chainalytics will assist customers with:
- Creating a strategic and operational profile. During this phase, Chainalytics will gain a deeper understanding of a client's current and planned strategies and profile its unique business requirements and goals as it relates to products, markets, and customers. The resulting conceptual model will define the scope of supply chain operations that require realignment with strategic objectives.
- Gathering and aggregating information. Chainalytics will identify data requirements and recommend a strategy for data collection, extraction, and use. For services like transportation procurement that require partner information, Chainalytics uses this step to collect, validate, and dissect additional details and proposals.
- Building and validating a baseline model. Chainalytics will create a baseline to accurately reflect a client's existing operations and desired goals. Using advanced tools to model the supply chain, the firm can identify any 'fast-track' opportunities where rapid implementation and quick rate of return warrant immediate attention.
Phase Two: Optimise
While firms might use approximations to make marginal improvements, to maximize supply chain value they need an analytical process that exploits sophisticated optimisation, simulation, and predictive technologies. Using leading, advanced decision technologies, Chainalytics can evaluate millions of possible combinations and choose the alternative that best minimizes cost, respects real-world constraints, and insures realistic plans. Chainalytics has vast project experience with the leading strategic and tactical supply chain tools and will help a client determine the best-fit solution by:
- Defining the analytical scope. Chainalytics identifies opportunities and creates alternatives that align with overall strategic objectives. Working with a client's management team and leveraging our experience and best practices, Chainalytics will identify the full range of alternatives that can realistically be implemented.
- Analysing alternative scenarios. By analysing an exhaustive set of viable scenarios, Chainalytics gains insight into the benefits of adopting new supply chain and logistics strategies. To evaluate each scenario, we test multiple levels of cost, lead times, demand, and capacity to identify the impact to optimal plans and policies. The result will be a narrow subset of opportunities that best reduce cost and improve service.
- Performing risk analysis. By prompting clients to consider additional alternatives, our analysis seeks all operations to uncover the most beneficial solutions. Through cross-scenario analysis, Chainalytics will evaluate this subset of alternatives that have similar results but very different levels of service impact, business risk, implementation challenge, and customer perception. The resulting best-fit recommendations will not only reduce cost and improve service, but also reduce the risk of failure as the supply change evolves.
Phase Three: Realize
Firms can save millions through better strategic and tactical decision-making. But even the best plans have no value if they are not properly implemented or effectively measured. Through our Continuous Analysis approach, Chainalytics helps clients monitor the major drivers that derail the supply chain and subsequently set up tolerances to trigger new analytical cycles. To insure that clients reap the benefits from our recommendations, Chainalytics will help clients:
- Formulate strategy. Whether facility, logistics provider, or inventory deployment decisions, Chainalytics will help each client choose a strategy that best meets its goals. Once the best-fit solutions are identified, Chainalytics work with each client to validate conclusions and manage the impacts of any change. This includes providing high-level financial analysis and identification of near-term improvements.
- Plan the implementation. To implement the recommended changes, Chainalytics will help clients develop a two-pronged implementation plan: 1) a near-term plan focused on high-value, fast payback opportunities, and 2) a long-term plan focused on more substantial changes to a client's strategies and tactics. Included in this plan, Chainalytics helps each client determine the capital investment, explicit financial impacts of each change, and timeline for managing the transition.
- Measure and monitor the performance. As a final step, Chainalytics will create a plan for metric-based Continuous Analysis so each client can evaluate supply chain decisions on an on-going basis. We will create strategic measurements and key operational targets to alert a client to sub optimal supply chain operations. Using Continuous Analysis, Chainalytics can quickly assess the precise impact of any event and suggest approaches that will improve performance. For example, through Chainalytics' Transportation Model-Based Benchmarking Consortium, clients benchmark transportation costs against the broader market to pinpoint areas that can be improved.
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