Fighting for Supply Chain Resilience - The Battle Against Inflation

There’s no doubt that the global economy is battling inflation. The supply chain can’t seem to catch a break thanks to various disruptions like political crises, changes in production patterns, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Supply chain professionals are now facing the unfortunate truth that inflation and its affects are here to stay.

Visibility of Total Lifecycle, Not Just Tier-1 Suppliers

However, it’s not all doom and gloom. There are things that procurement leaders can do to remain resilient against the challenges of inflation and use data-driven decision making, particularly when it comes to their suppliers. For instance, deciding whether to stick with current suppliers or making a switch to new ones.

Fortunately, and unfortunately, procurement leaders are pretty familiar with the need to remain agile in their supply chain strategies thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic and more recently, the war in Ukraine. For this reason, it’s of the utmost importance that you consider not just your suppliers but the full lifecycle of even your supplier’s suppliers so that you have more visibility over the entire process and can better plan for further disruptions.

Data – An Investment Worth Making

When it comes to inflation, there’s a list of things running through organisation’s minds. However, at the top of that list is likely “cost-savings.” By reducing costs, you also reduce risk when it comes to your firm’s viability. However, business must keep moving regardless of inflation. One way to do this is adopting supplier diversity initiatives. But in order to do this correctly and reap the most cost savings, it’s vital you have total visibility into suppliers’ data in order to diversify and expand your supply base.

roper supplier data management is the basis for high performance across Finance, Procurement, Compliance, and other departments. 

With a dedicated supplier data management solution, you can:

• Consolidate all information about suppliers from multiple databases and siloed systems in one place to have one source of truth

• Make supplier information accessible in real time to all employees across departments, so everyone sees the same information as soon as it’s available

• Drive compliance across the supplier lifecycle – from initial vendor master file cleansing, to supplier on-boarding, to ongoing updates and maintenance. 

External, third-party data sources (e.g. Dun & Bradstreet) can be added to the solution to create comprehensive, reliable and enriched supplier profiles. This empowers all business users to gain critical visibility over supplier information, proactively communicate with suppliers, and quickly achieve a higher level of productivity.

Key benefits of strategic supplier data management include:

• Smooth operations: Supplier data is used in multiple processes during the purchase-to-pay cycle, so ensuring accurate supplier data is critical to preventing bottlenecks, errors, delays, and miscommunications.

• Improved supplier relationships: Accurate data equals hassle-free processes and better interactions with suppliers, improving supplier relationships and ensuring goods/services are received and payments submitted in a timely manner.  

In Conclusion…

Regardless of how you slice and dice it, supplier data is helpful for a number of reasons including fighting to stay afloat when inflation seems determined to watch you drown. And though it may be tempting to cut costs across the board as an effort to battle inflation, investing in supplier data management tools is an investment worth making.