As businesses evaluate new tools to drive scale and greater productivity, it is important to look at the highest cost centers. It is no secret that supply chain management is the heart of most physical product businesses. The investments made in this business unit are essential to the company’s success and customer satisfaction. When looking at strategies to drive material gains, try leveraging supply chain relationship management (SCRM) software that gives your supply chain team more time back in their day. When the operators have more bandwidth, they have more energy to focus on even more tactical ways to cut costs for the business.
Supply chain software that provides immediate ROI
SCRM platforms aid a company’s supply chain operations by reducing dollars and person-hours spent. Here at Anvyl, we have exclusive access to supply chain statistics from hundreds of brands, and the data team conducted a study to see if and how our platform actually drives more supply chain productivity.
The results? Our customers manage their orders 3x faster when using SCRM software, and therefore are 3x more productive with our platform. Here’s how we know:
Our methodology
To talk about time saved, we need to know time spent in the presence and absence of SCRM software. Time spent managing orders with SCRM software is easy enough to measure — we can look directly at the usage patterns of our customers. It’s harder for us to know how long order management takes without the software — and in fact, our customers tend not to know either.
(Already we have an example of increased visibility due to SCRM! But “visibility” and “time-saved” are not the same thing, so let’s get back to the issue at hand…)
Uncovering a benchmark
When we work with supply chain teams, we gather some information before anyone even sees the SCRM software. We ask questions like:
- How many orders do you place in a year?
- How much time do you spend organizing files?
- How much time do you spend tracking down answers from vendors?
As you can imagine, the answers we get are rarely precise, but they tend to be accurate within a ballpark range. With these data points, we are able to estimate a benchmark for how efficient supply chain teams are at order management, pre-SCRM.
Comparing efficiencies across both sets of supply chain teams
We can do these calculations for all of our current and prospective customers. To analyze the difference, we plot each company’s total hours spent managing orders and compare that to the amount of orders they place in a year. We are able to draw the best fit lines to see how increasing “orders” affects “total time spent” for each population:
The trend is quite stark! For customers without SCRM platforms, their own productivity estimates indicate that each additional order placed requires about 98 extra minutes of active management time. A direct measurement of our SCRM customers reveals that each additional order placed requires about 33 minutes of active management time. Or, in other words, it’s about 3 times faster to manage an order via SCRM than without it.
Need similar time savings?
If you’re looking for ways to free up more time in your day, try Anvyl, the leading SCRM platform for supply chain teams. Our SCRM platform can be implemented and set-up within 24 hours. Talk to one of our specialists today to get started.
