Since the offset of the pandemic, the supply chain has been disrupted for many companies across the globe. According to Accenture, 94% of Fortune 1000 companies faced supply chain disruptions from COVID-19. As such, businesses are looking for new ways to have active visibility into critical supply chain components and interdependencies between departments and processes to predict disruptions and vulnerabilities.
Supply chain processes such as tendering, ordering, delivery, and paying are distributed across several teams. As a result, no one team has complete visibility into end-to-end processes. Also, since not all supply chain processes are well-documented, businesses have a hard time optimizing and redesigning them quickly for resiliency. In a recent Gartner survey, 87% of respondents reported that they plan to invest in supply chain resiliency within the next two years. Businesses want to quickly adapt to the unanticipated changes reliably, without compromising cost or quality.
Leverage Process Discovery For Staying Ahead of The Game
A few businesses leading the way in times of the pandemic are embracing process discovery to bring agility and resilience into their supply chain processes. With process discovery, businesses can identify time and resource wastage, unnecessary costs, bottlenecks, and common efficiency drainers.
1. Get granular visibility into supply chain processes
Process discovery leverages digital footprints left on disparate systems that necessarily don’t talk to one another to visualize a comprehensive end-to-end process. These process flows help you understand how work gets done in real life while revealing delays, exceptions and bottlenecks, or where vendors are not meeting their commitments.
Getting complete visibility into processes is critical as deviations creep in because of natural human behavior, restructuring of teams, IT infrastructure changes, or anything else. Process discovery helps you to identify these deviations and raise red flags well before it impacts the smooth functioning of the supply chain processes.
2. Mitigate supply chain risks
Process discovery provides a crystal-clear understanding of how the current process really works to quickly pinpoint the root cause of non-compliant, unusual, or high-cost processes that can expose supply chains to risk. It helps you to predict demand, understand which suppliers are the most reliable and responsive, highlight variations in vendor agreements, and more. Any deviation from the standard supply chain process is a potential red flag. For instance, if there is an unusual delay in order shipping or invoice processing you know there will be a ripple effect. Process discovery helps you to easily identify such deviations to enable course correction before they become uncontrollable or costly mistakes.
3. Find hidden process automation opportunities
Automated process discovery helps to analyze process gaps and discover the most efficient path for automation. You can dig deeper into your supply chain processes to identify automation opportunities that are not evident to the normal human eye. With automated process discovery, you can identify processes that need to be standardized before automating them. This way you don’t waste time and effort automating piecemeal tasks that bring only incremental benefits.
Reinvent your supply chain with SurfaceAI digital process discovery
Anticipating disruptions early on in the supply chain is key to improving efficiency. With SurfaceAI, you can visualize “AS-IS” processes and use the insights to create “TO-BE” processes. The fact-based analysis helps you to launch change programs with confidence and build supply chain resiliency and efficiency. Talk to our experts today to learn how SurfaceAI can transform your supply chain.