Category: Digital Consultancy & Business (EN)

Categories
Digital Consultancy & Business (EN) Featured-Post-ECommerce-EN

What are the different types of Supply Chains? 

What are the different types of Supply Chains? 

Auteur n°3 – Benjamin

  • Tags Supply Chains, Types of Supply Chains

Steps of the Supply Chain

A supply chain is a network of individuals, organizations, resources, activities, and technology that are involved in the creation and sale of products. A supply chain is a big process that contains several different aspects, like the delivery of necessary materials to the manufacturers and then sending of the products to customers.

Supply chains have several fundamental steps. First of all, you start with sourcing new materials, then you refine these materials into basic parts of your product, next step entails combining these parts to develop the full product. Since the product is ready you start working on order fulfillment and sales. Then comes the product delivery part. The last step is mostly about customer support and generally how return services work.

There are several different types of supply chains that ensure the success of the supply management system for your company. Since the supply chain is so complex, you have to carefully choose the model which will be most suited to your business requirements.

Continuous Flow Model

This is one of the most traditional models of supply chain and works best for businesses that operate with more stability. This model is used by many well-established industries, such as PepsiCo. Without stability, you’ll have less chance of using this model successfully.

For example, you can use this model when you produce the kind of products that always have stable demand on the market. Also in this case you can pay less attention to the customer demand profile.

Fast Chain Model

The fast chain model is one of the newest addition to supply chain strategies. It’s used by businesses that have products with shorter life cycles. For example, fashion designers might have a specific line of designs per season that won’t be repeated again. Indeed, it’s very useful for trendy products and even Nike is actively using it.

{CTA_BANNER_BLOG_POST}

Efficient Chain Model

The efficient chain model is best suited for hyper-competitive industries. With this supply chain model, the end goal is to maximize efficiency, have proper inventory management and maximize output from production equipment and labor.

General Mills actively uses this model, because their products don’t really differ from the ones that its competitors make, and also all of them have the same target audience.

Agile Model

A supply chain needs four components to be considered an agile model: virtual integration, process alignment, a network base, and market sensitivity. Virtual integration requires more information about market demands and how they changed. Process alignment is mostly about sharing supply chain responsibilities across the different aspects of the business.

The network base ensures that every role and responsibility will be equally divided between every actor in the supply chain. Market sensitivity is the component that changes the rate of production when demand in the market changes. Businesses that deal with demand variation highly benefit from this model, great example is ZARA because this way they are always attentive and look for new trends on the market that can be integrated into their business.

The Custom-Configured Model

Custom-configured model is focused on providing custom configurations and is most suited for companies where multiple configurations are required for products. It’s basically a combination of agile and continuous flow models.

For example, the company L.L. Bean lets their customers customize their backpacks before they place their orders. Compared to more traditional models custom-configured models might require additional investment from the company.

The Flexible Model

A flexible model will help you to manage the increase in demand during certain periods and also will help you out when the demand is low for a very long time. The supply chain should have these three key elements to be considered flexible: part segmentation, accurate stocking algorithms, and flexible planning.

For example, Staples is using a flexible model while delivering paper and writing utensil products. They realize that the demand for their product will be high during the beginning of school season and ensure that their stock will be full on notebooks, rulers, pens, pencils, etc. They manage everything based on the flexible model and are considerate of specific timelines, processes, and how demand could change in the market.

What We Offer

For more similar articles, make sure to scroll through our Publications on Edana. Your Swiss Digital Agency is ready to provide you with Expert-Level assistance built on customer loyalty, progressive ideas, and dedication. Our expertise includes Business Models and Planning, and many more.

Categories
Digital Consultancy & Business (EN) Featured-Posts-Vitrine (EN) Non classé

5 Steps to follow in Design Thinking

Appear in Google SERP when searched for 5 steps to follow in Design Thinking

5 Steps to follow in Design Thinking

Auteur n°3 – Benjamin

  • Tags 5 Steps in Design Thinking, Design Thinking

Importance of Design Thinking

In the modern world, design thinking is becoming increasingly important for numerous companies, because it’s a human-centered, innovative approach that’s focused on the needs of people and combines the possibilities of technology and all the requirements that businesses need for success.

You can apply design thinking to various fields because with this strategy you will be able to solve customers’ requirements with creative solutions. The main focus here is to always find solutions.

Empathize: Research Your Customer’s Needs

For successful design thinking empathy is crucial. You have to understand more about customers’ likes, dislikes, attitudes, habits, aspirations, etc. You have to connect to them on an emotional level. Understanding more about their culture and what kind of social environment they live in will help you a lot as well.

While focusing on the human-centered design process it’s important to turn empathy into your strongest tool. Information that you can get out of his process will most definitely help you to increase the demand for your product or improve your service.

Define: State Your Customers’ Needs and Problems

In the Define stage, you have to analyze the information that you got from the first stage. Organize data and look into the details that your team gathered to understand what could be the core obstacle for you and how you can overcome it. But this process shouldn’t stray away from your customers, you should always have them in mind.

At this stage, you’ll get enough ideas to establish several ways of dealing with your problems. Be very considerate at this stage, try to see the problem from your customer’s perspective, and avoid describing it in your words, which will be most definitely related to your company’s needs. This way you’ll have a clear idea about more solutions or at least you’ll ensure that your customers will be able to solve any issues themselves.

{CTA_BANNER_BLOG_POST}

Ideate: Challenge Assumptions and Create Ideas

At this stage, you are more prepared to generate ideas. You know what your customers need and you analyzed the data to create user-centric problem statements. Your team is ready to look at these problems from different perspectives and think about innovative solutions that will aid you with the problem statement.

There are numerous ideation techniques that will aid you in this process, such as Brainstorm, Brainwrite, etc. You need to think freely and expand your imagination to find the most crucial aspects of your problem statement. Test your ideas, delve more deeply into them and choose the one that will help you to move forward.

Prototype: Start to Create Solutions

This is an experimental stage, where you go through what you discovered in the ideation stage. You are identifying the best solutions for every problem, that was identified in the first three stages. Solutions are tested to determine how they will benefit customers and based on the results they are accepted or rejected.

By the end of this stage, it’s clear what are limitations of specific products and what problems are they really facing. No matter what you are working on, without going through this step it’s very hard to finalize your work successfully.

Test: Try Out Your Solutions

Based on the solutions that you found from the prototype stage you have to test everything on your product. This is the last step in design thinking. The end results might often show you different problems as well or just make you think of better solutions for your problems.

The ultimate goal here is to get a deep understanding of the product and its users and from the first stages, you already have information to maneuver easily through different scenarios. It’s important to get proper feedback from your customers as well. Also, what you are working on should be interesting for them.

What We Offer

For more similar articles, make sure to scroll through our Publications on Edana. Your Swiss Digital Agency is ready to provide you with Expert-Level assistance built on customer loyalty, progressive ideas, and dedication. Our expertise includes Business Models and Planning, and many more.