Today’s global marketplaces require strategic knowledge of every supply chain tier. Mapping your supply chain is complicated.
The key procedures and resources that ease supply chain mapping will be explained in this tutorial.
Advantages of Supply Chain Mapping
Transparency and supervision make a supply chain map a strategic instrument that boosts corporate performance. A supply chain map shows the movement of trade throughout your supplier chain:
- Source materials
- Refinement
- Production
- Packaging
- Distribution
Supply chain managers may make better judgements, enhance efficiency, limit risks, and find system improvements by knowing their company’s network infrastructure.
Here are the procedures to map a supply chain and the tools you need to map every network tier.
Supply Chain Map Creation Steps
Creating a supply chain map requires a detailed understanding of your suppliers’ activities. With various vendors and considerations, this procedure might be complicated. Understanding the basic processes of supply chain mapping can help you map your network and get insight into your organisation.
1. Initial Supplier Evaluation and Contact Info
Initial supplier assessment lets you understand supply chain scope. You’ll recognise your suppliers and their main contacts and comprehend their processes.
Benefits of first assessments: A preliminary supply chain evaluation will discover network links and provide you direct supplier access. This will examine your suppliers’ operations and establish communication networks to assist you handle crises and disruptions.
Finalising your assessment: One of the biggest obstacles in supply chain mapping is gathering a complete list of suppliers and their suppliers.
Initial assessment tools:
- List all of your suppliers—direct and indirect—then gather their contact details. Included should be address, important contacts, and lines of communication.
- From raw materials to end-of-life, a lifetime map of your products will highlight your suppliers and the full supply chain.
- Direct feedback on operations, subcontractors, compliance projects, and more can come via supplier self-assessment questionnaires (SAQs). This will identify any problems and offer a first evaluation of your vendors’ procedures.
2. Evaluate business priorities
Your company priorities will guide your supply chain decisions and operations modifications.
Evaluating your business’s goals helps you understand why you chose your suppliers and if your network suppliers are a suitable match. Knowing your environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals helps vendors uphold corporate principles.
Meet stakeholder expectations: Stakeholder expectations usually drive company priorities. Sustainability, ethical sourcing, and supplier quality assurance are examples. Ask yourself if your suppliers’ activities support corporate aims and stakeholder values.
Priority assessment tools:
- List your company’s basic principles and long-term goals as the most significant aspects.
- You can also include consumers, investors, and workers to establish their sourcing expectations. When mapping your supply chain, these priorities will identify suppliers who may harm your brand.
3. Find Risks
As you map your supply chain, identifying hazards can help you understand network weaknesses and respond to emergencies.
Risk assessment: Mapping your supply chain risks can help you choose sourcing methods by revealing your supply chain’s weakest points and preventing interruptions.
Risk evaluations identify system redundancies. Redundancies minimise supplier dependency but might add unneeded costs.
Comprehensive risk assessment: Analyse all internal and external network hazards. Suppliers with ESG compliance issues, market volatility, and supplier stability are examples.
Risk assessment tools:
- Create a broader supply chain risk map beside your usual map. This will reveal your chain’s primary weaknesses and hazards at every stage.
- Third-party risk mapping services help you consider all issues, including indirect hazards that are typically neglected.
4. Implement Purchase Order Tracking Systems
Tracking items from purchase orders (POs) ensures stakeholder transparency. Supply chain mapping benefits you and your customers by providing concrete value.
PO tracking solutions allow you to trace each product’s origin and route. This will track every item from source to customer.
PO tracking also reveals consumers where their orders come from. Customers are buying more sustainable and ethical products, making this more crucial. PO traceability verifies sustainable claims and ESG principles.
PO tracking challenges: Full-scale traceability is hard. Products might come from many sources with global supply networks.
Supply chain management software can help with full-scale PO tracking. You can get realtime information on your operations and more transparency using IoT, AI, and blockchain.
5. Determine Compliance and Regulations
Identifying compliance and regulatory constraints that affect ESG due diligence is crucial to supply chain mapping. While exceeding legal criteria is good for brand reputation, understanding your overseas suppliers’ compliance standards is crucial to seamless operations.
Benefits of understanding regulatory requirements: International supply chains may not be governed by their suppliers’ rules, yet supplier infractions will still have severe repercussions. Fines, supply chain interruptions, and brand reputation harm can occur from ESG compliance failure.
Understanding foreign needs: Ensuring your worldwide suppliers fulfil national and corporate laws is the biggest challenge in finding compliance and regulatory requirements. Take into account international, domestic, and corporate interests.
Regulatory compliance tools:
Document all local and international supply chain compliance rules or hire a third-party compliance specialist. Understanding your operations’ requirements can help you satisfy standards and preserve ESG practices.
Assess each supplier’s ESG compliance history. This can help you reduce compliance risk and identify vendors who may threaten your business. KPI dashboards provide real-time statistics on supply chain operations, helping you analyse quality trends, supplier ethics ratings, and supplier performance.
Regular audits assure corporate standards and regulatory compliance and keep you informed of suppliers’ activities. ESG professionals may considerably decrease compliance infractions and guarantee complete and accurate audits.
Getting Help
Modern supply networks are dynamic, linked, and constantly changing. Real-time updates to ensure your supply chain meets your values, goals, and expansion as well as a thorough knowledge of the operations and networks of your business will come from supply chain mapping.
