Operations Strategy, Strategic Sourcing and Resilient Supply Chains

Strategic Operations involve aligning business operations with long-term strategic goals to enable and improve sustainable performance, ensuring that teams are not just focused on immediate tasks, but also driving towards the organisation’s broader objectives. The four elements of operations strategy include capacity planning, supply chain optimization, quality management & control, and technology and innovation. Each of these elements are essential to streamlining business processes and improving overall performance.

Due to the disruption in the global supply chains caused by the recent Pandemic and Geo-political developments conventional Traditional Sourcing is giving way to Strategic Sourcing. It involves a targeted approach to procurement activities. Having a strategic sourcing strategy allows companies to formalise the way they gather information. This allows them to source the best value that aligns with their long-term goals. The process of strategic sourcing requires continuous market analysis, goal recognition and an ongoing re-evaluation of sourcing activities. It is, therefore, a long-term process.

Strategic sourcing assesses all the costs of a company’s operations related to external suppliers and considers what value suppliers can bring and their compatibility with the long term goals of the organisation. Where traditional sourcing focuses on high volumes and bulk buying to secure discounts, strategic sourcing focuses on securing the best quality for the lowest cost using JIT inventory management. Strategic sourcing operates globally and involves in-depth reviews and agreements to ensure the best impact on a company’s operations.

However, in the event of disruption of the Sourcing strategy, building Supply Chain Resiliency is the key concept  for robust operations. Many organizations globally suffered during the Pandemic and Geo-political crisis due to the lack of Resilience by Design in their supply chain strategies. Resilience is the ability to respond quickly to operational disruptions through flexible contingency planning and forecasting – from material sourcing to logistics and the final delivery of products and services. However, supply chain resilience is not one-dimensional. To create a resilient operation, you must invest in all four of the pillars of resilience: Visibility, Flexibility, Collaboration, and Control.

RLACM provides a portfolio of services supported by cutting edge methods, technologies, tools and techniques based on more than three decades of wisdom and knowledge in preparing organizations and its leaders for dealing with uncertain change, mitigating the associated risks and successfully identifying and leveraging opportunities.  Reach out to us for a conversation at the contact address provided.