How Supply Chain Analytics Boosts Customer Experience and Profitability

The supply chain is a complex ecosystem that impacts a company’s ability to achieve high customer happiness scores and optimize profitability. Today’s organizations are using supply chain analytics to solve problems quickly and identify opportunities to increase efficiency and lower costs. By using data related to each component of the supply chain—from sourcing raw materials, to final delivery, to the consumer—business teams can make better decisions and achieve stronger results in today’s competitive market. 

What Is Supply Chain Analytics?

Supply chain analytics is the process used to uncover patterns and gain insights into a company’s supply chain by analyzing data generated by its systems and applications. This supply chain data provides visibility into procurement, inventory management, order management, warehousing, fulfillment, and shipping. 

Because there are so many components and steps to the modern supply chain, there are many points where something could go wrong, impacting all the steps following the point of failure. For this reason, today’s companies rely on supply chain analytics for supply chain management to maintain customer satisfaction while keeping costs down.

How Supply Chain Analytics Can Improve a Business

Supply chain analytics empowers businesses to make long-term and short-term changes that deliver significant improvements to operations. As companies analyze and act on their supply chain data, they become more competitive and resilient. Here are six ways supply chain analytics benefits today’s organizations. 

Gain visibility

Supply chain analytics allows companies to get a full-picture view of their supply chain. Because supply chain data is generated from multiple sources in a variety of formats, a cloud-native analytics solution connected to a centralized repository of data is crucial for visibility. Business teams can more effectively spot patterns and anomalies when they’re able to analyze all relevant data in a single location.

Better understand risks

Businesses use supply chain analytics to identify both known and future risks. Armed with this information, they can more effectively plan and prevent problems from affecting their ability to deliver. 

Address disruptions quickly

When a disruption does occur, teams can use supply chain analytics to quickly identify the source, learn why the problem is happening,  and work to resolve it. Data can be analyzed in real time, and alerts can be triggered to notify teams of potential problems before they turn into a nightmare scenario.

Improve the customer experience

Better planning and quickly addressing disruptions improve the customer experience. When a company can keep its delivery promises, customers stay loyal. By implementing supply chain analytics and improving supply chain management, companies can dramatically reduce the loss of customers to competitors. 

Plan more accurately

Companies use customer data to help predict demand. This insight allows them to decide what products to prioritize and which regions are likely to require what SKUs at any given point in the future. Analyzing customer data can also help predict customer needs in the future to inform product development.

Increase profitability

Much of supply chain management is focused on lean operations. The more costs can be reduced, the greater profits the company will see. Supply chain analytics allows organizations to monitor operations and identify opportunities to increase efficiency.

How Companies Are Using Supply Chain Analytics

Organizations across a variety of industries are improving supply chain management with analytics. Let’s look at a few examples. 

Retail

Retail businesses are using supply chain analytics for many purposes, including capacity planning, demand forecasting, and route optimization. Accurate planning and forecasting are crucial so companies can ensure they understand what their volume will be and stay within their allocation limits. Route optimization helps companies identify risks and plot the most efficient routes to optimize costs and improve delivery times. 

Manufacturing

Supply chain analytics also increases manufacturing operational efficiency and effectiveness. Among other benefits, analytics helps companies achieve real-time data visibility across the factory floor and prevent low stock or excess inventory, as well as reduce disruptions by analyzing root causes of past problems. Manufacturers are also discovering product development opportunities based on analysis of order data.

Life sciences

Pharma, biopharma, and medical device companies use supply chain analytics to ensure a reliable supply of life-saving equipment, therapies, drugs, and vaccines. Life sciences companies are also using supply chain analytics to inform product development and balance R&D costs, operational complexity, and regulatory scrutiny.

Snowflake Streamlines Supply Chain Analytics

Snowflake is empowering organizations across industries to streamline supply chain analytics. With the Snowflake Data Cloud, companies can easily aggregate data from multiple sources in any format and ensure that it is fully governed for quality and security.  

Snowflake’s tools provide the flexibility needed to integrate and execute advanced analytics in the expanding range of today’s valuable data, such as call records, weather data, economic data, and sensor data. The result is constantly updated supply chain data that provide comprehensive insights to drive performance and efficiency.

Combine diverse data sources: Snowflake’s cloud-native technology allows you to easily warehouse structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data from internal and external sources.

Process data faster: Snowflake’s high-performance architecture makes it possible to easily analyze your data and uncover insights by combining familiar SQL queries with consistently high performance at any scale of data, applications, and users.

Find relationships within your data quickly: With your data in a centralized system, you don’t have to struggle with integration and interoperability issues that slow you down. You’ll get exponentially quicker insight from your data to drive time-sensitive business decisions.

Start Benefiting from Supply Chain Analytics

In a global marketplace with more moving parts than ever before, supply chain management has never been more important to a company’s success. And customers have never had higher expectations than they do today. Supply chain analytics delivers significant ROI for companies who implement it to better understand potential risks, improve planning, optimize inventory management, and better meet their customers’ expectations. 

See Snowflake’s capabilities for yourself. To give it a test drive, sign up for a free trial.