Beginning to End

Customer Demand Drives the Supply Chain by Dennie Norman

From beginning to end ... and that end is all about customer satisfaction and your increased profitability. Your company has extensive inventories to track and move, a greater number of products to generate, quality standards to maintain, numerous suppliers to negotiate with, and an ever-increasing need to acquire, satisfy and retain additional customers to remain profitable. It is imperative that the links in the supply chain be managed – and there are substantial benefits if you manage them well.

SAS understands that every company, in order to offer the best products and services, must necessarily have a long list of suppliers. There are some components that you can get only from a specific supplier, while another supplier gives you a price no one else can beat. When your supplier list runs into the thousands, or tens of thousands, things can get very complicated, especially when you consider that many businesses are subsidiaries of larger parent companies.

Beyond the issues of performing effective supplier relationship management (SRM), there are the product storage and distribution challenges every company must face. It's expensive to keep products in warehouses or even in storerooms within the retail shops themselves. Every carton that just sits there occupying space is costing you money. Being able to forecast demands and effectively plan distribution significantly reduces the amount of time between assembly and the selling of the product, thereby reducing your total cost of production.

Recent innovations have also affected the dynamics of the entire supply chain, which in turn affects consumer behavior, product quality and an organization's profit margins. Improvements in technology have sped up production processes and made more products available. Globalization has increased production worldwide and created new price competition for suppliers. The Internet, discount warehouses and trading exchanges have combined with more traditional channels to give customers significantly greater choice in product selection and needs fulfillment.

Your need to save time and money while also satisfying increasing customer demand for higher quality products and service levels is why SAS has designed a suite of solutions based on our unique Intelligence Architecture to give you SAS Supply Chain Intelligence. The SAS Intelligence Architecture, the foundation for intelligence, brings together disparate silos of data that are housed in various operational and legacy systems to derive new, previously unknown business intelligence based on the whole picture. This holistic perspective is one that is consistent and accurate, enabling you to gain intelligent answers for your business decision-making process.

SAS Supply Chain Intelligence Solutions are a suite of analytical applications that integrate unique analytical insights, existing IT investments and operational data to drive revenue and reduce operational costs. From forecasting and pricing to purchasing and replenishment, superior analytical applications enable organizations to match profitability goals with strategically defined customer service and quality levels. SAS Supply Chain Intelligence Solutions are designed to let you optimize sourcing strategies to create a competitive advantage through lower supply-based costs and higher quality offerings.