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Supply chain professionals continue to be pressured to deliver superior operational results while at the same time reducing costs.  However, reducing supply chain costs is an effort that can be fraught with risk.  Sometimes an innovative cost-saving strategy that sounds good on paper can have a disastrous impact when applied in reality - such initiatives sometimes ending up increasing costs rather than reducing them. Forward-looking managers today seek to strike the right balance between supply chain responsiveness and the costs required to deliver desired business results.  This course will explore key concepts and solutions that can be employed to optimize this balance.  When properly executed and applied in practice, these concepts can simultaneously improve both customer satisfaction and corporate profitability.  This course will deliver actual cost-saving strategies that participants can take back to their firms to drive real supply chain improvement.

By the end of this course delegates will be able to:

• Benchmark your supply chain capabilities against the world’s best firms
• Manage and optimize your inventory to deliver financial results
• Unlock new business value by effectively managing your supply base
• Manage information to deliver supply chain excellence
• Building a performance management program to define, measure, and improve your results
• Analyze the effectives of your firm’s supply chain practices
• Identify areas offering the greatest opportunity for improvement
• Develop a process improvement roadmap
• Create an inventory strategy that speeds cash flow
• Evaluate and work with suppliers to deliver tangible business results
• Demonstrate the financial results of implementing innovative supply chain concepts
• Establish senior executive buy-in for new initiatives
• Launch a supply chain benchmarking effort
• Bridge the gap between the supply chain and internal IT organizations

Supply chain professionals, warehousing professionals, logistics and transportation professionals, sourcing, procurement, and supplier management professionals, production and manufacturing professionals, anyone who needs an understanding of supply chain concepts that can deliver lasting value for your business

Supply Chain Benchmarking

· Quantitative vs. qualitative benchmarking

· Types of process frameworks

· Benchmarking against process standards

· Establishing a cross-functional benchmarking team

· Defining performance gaps

· Prioritization and developing a performance roadmap

· Building the business case for change

Unlocking Your Cash: Inventory Management and Optimization

· Types of inventory

· Analysing and segmenting your inventory: a three-dimensional approach

· Applying procurement strategies that maximize inventory turns

· Speeding the cash-to-cash cycle time

· The financial justification for change

Managing the Supply Base to Unlock New Business Value

· Supplier relationship management: strategies,  approaches, and tools

· Segmenting and rationalizing the supply base

· Supplier collaboration and your company's culture

· A different approach to cost-cutting

· Product development and operations: profiting from your suppliers' technical expertise

Managing Information to Deliver Supply Chain Excellence

· The importance of ERP systems

· Understanding your company’s IT infrastructure and capabilities

· Approaches to internal systems integration

· IT integration with all your suppliers?

· Normalizing, digitizing, and automating and accelerating the demand signal

A New Paradigm for Outsourcing

· Is your relationship transactional or outcome-based?

· Defining desired outcomes that are measurable

· Developing an effective outsourcing contract

· Designing a pricing model that incentivizes desired behaviours

· Evaluating cost/service trade-offs

· Creating a governance structure that works

Performance Management: Defining, Measuring & Improving Your Results

• Rationale and approach to performance management
• Identifying, defining, and tracking your metrics
• Aligning your metrics with corporate goals: creating a cascading metrics program
• Incentives and continuous improvement