Strategies used by Leaders within the Supply Chain

Strategies used by Leaders within the Supply Chain
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Strategies used by Leaders within the Supply Chain
1.0 Introduction
Leadership is understood as the art of motivating people to act towards attaining a shared goal. Supply chain management necessitates a company’s leader to develop an effective supply chain strategy. Leadership is a vital function of supply chain management that helps to maximize efficiency and attain the goals of the company (Horth, Miller & Mount, 2016). An effective leader formulates a clear supply chain strategy that allows the organization to attain its overall goals and purpose. An organization’s supply chain strategy needs to focus on the efficient movement and transfer of inventory. The strategy is the only efficient way that can be used to balance the usually difficult-to-forecast pulls of supplier availability and customer demand (Birhanu, Krishnanand & Rao, 2018). This research paper explores the strategies that companies with effective leaders can use within their supply chain.
2.0 Strategies
Supply chains comprise the end-to-end flow of money, products, and information. As such, how they are managed greatly affects the competitiveness of an organization in several areas such as service perception, speed to market, working capital requirements, and product cost. In this context, Qi et al. (2017) pointed out that the right alignment of the supply chain of an organization with the company’s business strategy is of great importance to ensuring a high level of business performance. There are several strategies used by company leaders in their supply chains. However, the strategies used vary from one organization to another depending on the type of company. The supply chain strategies used by a retail company, for example, might be different from the ones used by a manufacturing firm. A company leader chooses the appropriate supply chain strategy for his/her company that will allow him/her to manage the business more effectively (Gattorna, 2016).
Strategy 1: Aligning supply chain with the company’s business goals
Company leaders align their supply chain with the business goals of their organizations by integrating corporate business planning with sales and operations planning. Even though processes of sales and operations planning enable coordination amongst distribution, manufacturing, as well as sales, some companies do have gaps and disconnects amongst operations, strategy, and finance (Lee, 2014). Some company leaders use integrated business planning involving technology, process, and people aspects of the organization to try to bridge these gaps. This process incorporates operations planning with a fiscal strategic forecasting and budgeting systems and enables sound trade-off decisions to be made (Prajogo, Mena & Nair, 2018).
The resultant marriage of end-to-end processes will ensure that sales objectives and budgets are corroborated against a bottom-up and comprehensive operating plan and implemented in a responsive manner. At the same time, the strategy reconciles the operating plan against fiscal objectives (Lee, 2014). True integrated business planning links the processes of sales and operations planning with organizational business planning and allows organizations to attain the correct balance of demand and supply, which are aligned with the organization’s overall corporate goals. This offers concurrent visibility to every major aspect for success, such as performance, risk, product, supply, and demand all through the company and across the extended supply chain (Birhanu, Krishnanand & Rao, 2018).

Strategy 2: Take on a business operating and planning model that is demand-driven basing upon real-time demand insights
Madhani (2017) pointed out that the right contingency planning and prediction tools would ensure not just a complete view, but also a good response to risks like natural disasters affecting manufacturing, political turmoil, and suppliers going out of business. Company leaders can then alter promotions and pricing strategies to shape demand, drive growth in revenue, move additional products speedily, or increase margins further for high-demand product items whose market supply is limited (Prajogo, Mena & Nair, 2018). In essence, the important thing is for the company leader to have the forethought to mitigate challenging events and leverage opportunities so that the organization can survive and succeed. Thanks to cloud supply chain technologies, companies are able to see in real time precisely where their entire inventory is, from the shelf of the store back to the manufacturer (Madhani, 2017). It is of note that an agile demand-driven and responsive supply chain calls for end-to-end visibility throughout the business. Lee (2014) pointed out that organizations can have an agile demand-driven supply chain through the use of cloud technology.
Strategy 3: Create an agile and adaptive supply chain with quick planning and integrated implementation
As soon as a company leader can better understand and shape risk and demand, he/she adapts the supply chains of the company to changing events and opportunit...