Dramatic changes in consumer behavior, the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, and worker shortages have led to fragile supply chains in the U.S. across multiple industries. And as shipping delays and supply chain shortages continue to negatively impact business operations across the nation, more organizations are prioritizing supply chain resilience.
What is supply chain resilience?
Supply chain resilience refers to a supply chain’s responsiveness, adaptability, and flexibility when unexpected events and disruptions occur. A resilient supply chain should have the capacity to maintain optimal operation levels and maintain control during economic uncertainty.
How does supply chain resilience benefit the modern organization? 2020’s worldwide COVID-19 lockdowns highlighted the fragility of the North American supply chain, creating ongoing disruptions that continue to plague countless industries. In fact, an estimated $238 billion worth of cargo saw significant delays from January through November 2021 outside of California ports near Los Angeles and Long Beach.
How can businesses achieve supply chain resilience?
While adversity has the power to strengthen supply chain resilience and prepare businesses for unexpected disruptions, there are many ways that procurement teams can help. Ongoing, integrated supply chain planning and investing in supply chain visibility and process automation can help businesses boost resilience.
Here are a few ways to get started:
1. Focus on short-term, daily demands.
Effective short-term measures can help businesses prepare for long-term supply chain disruptions. Create a plan and establish procedures to implement when disruptions occur. These processes should focus on fast detection, response, and recovery. To develop a foolproof plan, look for ways to transform these daily demands into actionable insights.
2. Harness the power of automation to boost your procurement department.
The right digital procurement software improves procedures and can lower costs by up to 45 percent.
A solution such as Vroozi can help your business:
- Manage and oversee all purchases received from suppliers, which can help you prepare for unexpected disruptions.
- Use automation for tactical processing so people can spend more time monitoring vulnerability drivers.
- Scale as demand on your employees and business processes increases.
- Gain visibility into performance management so that adjustments can be made when disruptions occur and deliveries won’t arrive on time.
- Factor in the higher cost and shortages of energy, materials, and transportation.
- Identify operational risks, such as late or non-deliveries, overpayments, fraud, and incorrect orders.
3. Partner with the right procure-to-pay solution to achieve supply chain resilience.
How can a procurement automation solution such as Vroozi help? A procure-to-pay platform offers higher levels of spend transparency, better supplier performance and on-time delivery, less maintenance and rework, boosted productivity, and more.
Only 24 percent of businesses that manually process less than 20,000 payments annually can pay all their purchase order invoices on time. This can lead to late payments and possible disruptions.
Vroozi has the ability to improve P2P visibility and efficiency, which increases:
- Visibility into performance management.
- Digital access to preferred and approved suppliers through a centralized marketplace.
- The effectiveness of automated processes by eliminating manual invoice management, which is extremely time-consuming and detracts from fraud detection.
- Working capital improvement opportunities.
- Positive supplier relationships.
- Opportunities to realize pre-negotiated discounts and savings by only working with approved suppliers. This boosts your organization’s financial control, spend visibility, and compliance.
- Automation and error-checking capabilities will help improve your organization’s data quality and quantity, leading to improved real-time analysis and better, faster insights. This data will lead to better decision-making and more informed spend decisions.
Boost supply chain resilience.
Vroozi’s modern, mobile, and modular platform makes business buying easier. Search for goods and services, submit purchase requests, and approve orders with the simple click of a button. Vroozi Purchase allows you to shop, manage, and approve orders from any device at any time, managing and storing all relevant information in a centralized, easy-to-use platform. Book a demo today.
