Co-authored with Edson Greenwood
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions do a great job aligning financial reporting, inventories, and customer data with a complex supply chain. However, ERPs don’t allow a team to collaborate and manage the manufacturing workflows that keep supply chain teams and suppliers synced. The addition of Anvyl’s Supply Chain Relationshipment Management (SCRM) tool can provide immediate visibility, improve collaboration, and be that central hub that serves as a single source of truth for an organization.
The simple definition of SCRM
SCRM is a platform that connects all of your company’s supply chain data, relationships, and interactions, both internal and external, throughout the supply chain process. SCRM increases a team’s bandwidth, builds resiliency in a supply chain, streamlines processes, and improves profitability. The end result is improved supplier management, order management, productivity, and more.
How SCRMs empower teams and improve productivity and performance
SCRM platforms provide visibility across the entire first mile, enabling companies to access real-time data, make critical decisions, and avoid disruptions through centralized collaboration of both internal and external parties.
For example, on Anvyl’s SCRM you can:
- Launch New Products: Managing new product initiatives takes time. Our platform helps reduce the time spent sourcing new suppliers, managing artwork and design files, and ensuring tasks are completed.
- Evaluate Suppliers: Supplier scorecards help you track and measure your supplier performance automatically. By assessing your supplier performance, it provides the brand with the ability to focus on cost saving or corrective actions.
- Track Production: Streamline communication and easily access relevant documents to avoid delays on the receiving end. When unexpected changes occur, you are notified through the platform and can adjust quickly.
- Increase Visibility: Empower teams by giving them access to relevant information so you no longer have to respond to everyone’s phone call, text, email, and wechat messages everyday.
- Manage Orders by Exception: Pin orders that require the most attention to track production stages and assign tasks to ensure timelines are met across the organization.
- Automate the Supply Chain: Our SCRM gets smarter the more you use it. Your expertise combined with an intelligent system that tracks repetition will allow you to activate automation triggers for specific requirements that your collaborators must take action on.
Generally speaking, ERPs are customized to help organizations manage certain supply chain processes across different business functions. However, there are a number of gaps in the tactical execution of these processes, which is why SCRM fits nicely into existing ERP workflows and capabilities.
Where ERPs fall short
- Automated Production Updates: Whether you are proactively reaching out to suppliers or receiving one-off updates, a streamlined system to automate all of the production updates could reduce a huge amount of work for your team. ERPs don’t have this streamlined process of alerting teams; they require manual input which can lead to error and waste valuable time.
- Supplier Communication: Unfortunately, only emails are triggered from ERPs. The rest of your supplier interactions that fall outside of the platform will need to be tracked manually, both internally and externally.
- External Collaboration and Alignment: An ERP is focused on internal metrics and process alignment, it doesn’t allow external collaborators to participate.
- Project Management: There are many moving parts in a supply chain and your ERP system may have a hard time tracking all of the tasks that require action. This is why internal communication and tasks are mostly done offline through communication tools like email or slack. Process improvements, collaboration, and accountability can be achieved through SCRM with its built-in task management solution.
- Finding New Pre-Vetted Suppliers: SCRMs are able to use the data from your POs and help you find opportunities where you can save costs by surfacing other pre-vetted supplier partners. Your ERP generally will not store or save supplier information for recommendations beyond your existing suppliers, so having both in place really gives you a leg up in optimizing and controlling your supply chain costs.
- Logistics tracking: It is highly unlikely that your supply chain will operate perfectly at all times, which is why logistics tracking is so important for ensuring your plans run smoothly. This function is completely lacking in ERPs and requires additional tools to be used to track the status of those shipments. Integrations between your ERP, SCRM, and logistics partners gives you full visibility into where your goods are and helps you analyze how your supply chain’s shipment performance compares to your plan..
- Automated scores for supplier performance: As SCRMs store data about your supply chain, the system automatically packages the data into reports on your supplier’s performance. This information helps you evaluate suppliers, clearly identify action items to improve your supplier relationships, and allows you to identify when you need to source a new supplier.
SCRMs encourage you and your suppliers to stay organized and complete projects on-time. Internal metrics are still protected behind your ERP, and both systems work harmoniously together to communicate back and forth to drive visibility towards the most up-to-date information and actions needed.
How to implement your SCRM
In the past, organizations have defaulted to ERPs because SCRMs did not exist. Anvyl has changed that dynamic and many organizations can achieve much of what they are looking for by adding a SCRM solution. In many cases, particularly for startups and smaller enterprises, companies can combine several applications to get the necessary functionality without having to implement an ERP system. Ready to build your own supply chain tech stack?
For more information on SCRMs and how Anvyl has helped organizations manage their supply chains to gain more visibility, make better decisions, and save on costs, please contact us.
