Case Study
How often do supply chain leaders assess their network for improvements?
Part II in our series on assessing your network design’s maturity
As we wrote in Part I of this series, we recently ran a quiz to help supply chain professionals benchmark their network design maturity. Results show that the majority of respondents use spreadsheets to support network design and consider themselves “advanced beginners” in the use of network optimization technologies. Our quiz has revealed many challenges people are struggling with, perhaps the biggest one is that it takes a long time to get the answers they need. This can be incredibly stressful and frustrating and explains why some resort to gut feel or past experience to make decisions.
The quiz showed that it takes weeks (38%) or days (30%) to get the answers supply chain professionals need to address network design questions. A few respondents, 18%, said it took months. Only 13% finds the answers they need in a matter of hours.
When asked how often they assess their supply chain network for improvements, less than 10% of respondents perform assessments on a weekly basis. A combined majority of 52% does so in an annual or quarterly basis, and 23% does so every few years.
The importance of an agile supply chain network
In today’s volatile environment, things are in constant flux. You can’t just “set it and forget it” anymore. Having your finger on the pulse is more important than ever. Forward-thinking supply chain leaders can become more resilient if they try to anticipate future events and have contingency plans ready to ensure an appropriate response or to asses supply chain risk. AIMMS makes supply chain software accessible so that companies without large analytics teams or expertise can still get the advantages of this capability.
Solutions like Network Design Navigator offer powerful optimization technology, which has been used by leading companies for decades, but in an easy to use cloud-based format. Anyone in the supply chain team can use it, not just the data scientists or technical experts. Our software is conceived for supply chain professionals by supply chain professionals.
Download our Buyer’s Guide for Network Design Software to get more research insights and a checklist of items to consider when evaluating vendors. Curious about using AIMMS for Network Design? Speak to one of our experts.
