Enhancing supply chain management with area charts
Area charts effectively visualize complex supply chain management data, identify trends, inventory fluctuations, and demand forecasting. Utilizing these charts can enhance decision-making, ensuring efficient and successful supply chain operations. Explore this blog to learn how area charts can impact supply chain management.
Benefits of supply chain management in business performance
The following are some of the essentials of supply chain management in business performance:
Reduce costs: Supply chain management assists companies in cutting expenses by maximizing inventory levels, minimizing waste, and negotiating lower rates with suppliers.
Improve efficiency: By optimizing supply chain operations and minimizing delays, supply chain management aids firms in increasing efficiency.
Increase customer satisfaction: By ensuring the timely and complete delivery of products, supply chain management allows businesses to enhance customer satisfaction.
Reduce risk: By preventing supply chain interruptions and ensuring managers can access required resources, supply chain management helps organizations lower risk.
Improve agility: By enhancing their ability to adapt to shifting consumer demand and market conditions, supply chain management aids firms in becoming more flexible.
Inventory optimization: Supply chain management aids in the maintenance of ideal inventory levels, lowering holding costs while ensuring enough stock is on hand to satisfy demand.
Problems affecting supply chain management
In supply chain management, some issues experienced by inventory managers and storekeepers include:
- Volatile demand: Fluctuating customer demand can lead to inventory shortages or surpluses.
- Poor visibility: Lack of transparency across the supply chain can result in inefficiencies and errors.
- Inefficient processes: Outdated or complex processes can slow operations and increase costs.
- Supplier risks: Dependency on suppliers can lead to vulnerabilities if they face disruptions.
- Transportation issues: Delays and rising costs in transport can affect delivery times and budgets.
- Regulatory compliance: Keeping up with changing regulations can be challenging and costly.
- Inventory management: Balancing stock levels to prevent overstocking or understocking is difficult.
- Cybersecurity threats: Digital supply chain tools are susceptible to cyber-attacks and data breaches.
How area charts improve supply chain management
Utilizing area charts for supply chain management can address these common issues:
- Demand forecasting: Area charts can depict historical trends, helping managers anticipate future demand and adjust inventory levels accordingly.
- Visibility enhancement: By visualizing the flow of goods and materials, area charts can highlight bottlenecks and inefficiencies, improving overall transparency.
- Process optimization: Area charts can show process performance over time, identifying areas for streamlining and improvement.
- Supplier performance: Visualizing supplier delivery times and quality metrics can identify risk-prone suppliers and enable proactive management.
- Transportation monitoring: Area charts can track transportation times and costs, assisting in optimizing routes and mitigating delays.
- Compliance tracking: By representing compliance metrics, area charts ensure all parts of the supply chain adhere to relevant regulations.
- Inventory levels: Area charts provide insight into inventory trends, helping maintain optimal levels and reduce carrying costs.
- Cybersecurity awareness: Visualizing incident data pinpoints security vulnerabilities and informs strategies to strengthen cyber defenses.
BI influences supply chain management by offering insights, boosting decision-making, and increasing efficiency.
Supply chain management visualizations using area charts
Here are a few ways in which area charts can effectively represent data from supply chains:
Cost distribution
This metric shows expense allocation within supply chain stages. It helps review supply chain costs, identify inefficiencies, optimize resource distribution, evaluate supply chain performance, and discern areas for cost cuts or enhancements.
Perfect orders by warehouse
This metric measures warehouse order accuracy and timeliness to assess supply chain efficiency, ensure perfect deliveries, evaluate operational accuracy and customer satisfaction, and improve logistics and performance.
Inventory days of supply
This metric calculates how long current inventory will last, given recent usage rates. It is essential for assessing cost distribution, identifying weaknesses, and enhancing resource use in the supply chain, thereby enabling a thorough evaluation of cost efficiency in supply chain management.
Inventory carrying cost
This metric represents expenses associated with holding and storing inventory over a specific period, optimizing inventory levels, and reducing costs by calculating associated expenses, ensuring efficient resource allocation in supply chain management.
Sales by week
This metric tracks weekly revenue from goods or services in supply chain management. It helps manage supply chains by monitoring demand changes, optimizing inventory, and enabling real-time adjustments, thus reducing understock or overstock.
Syncfusion’s Bold BI has created a corresponding dashboard to monitor and track these charts. This data visualization and analytic tool enhances decision-making and improves supply chain efficiency by providing insights for optimal resource utilization and operational improvement. The dashboard offers real-time tracking and customizable reporting options. This enables businesses to identify trends, evaluate risks, and streamline their supply chain.
Tips for using the right BI tool for supply chain management
Here are some guidelines for selecting the appropriate BI tool:
- Identify your specific needs: Clearly identify your needs for supply chain management before selecting a BI technology.
- User-friendly interface: Choose a user-friendly BI tool that allows all team members to generate and view reports easily without much training.
- Integration capabilities: Ensure the BI tool seamlessly merges with your supply chain management software and tools.
- Data visualization: Select a BI tool with diverse visualization features like charts and interactive dashboards to track supply chain progress easily.
- Data security: Ensure the BI tool has robust security features, like encryption, authentication, and user access management.
In conclusion, area charts enhance supply chain management by visually revealing trends, aiding quick decision-making, and allowing for proactive efficiency and resilience improvements.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on January 3, 2024.
