Founder of InspireXT Kuldeep Thakur, speaks about how the company can help manufacturers bring their core data together to help offer a single view of customers.
KT: Life used to be simple! When the business started, there was a limited range of products, with one site, one system (often bespoke to your processes) and a set of customers that were known personally. It was easy to be consistent and responsive – and customers enjoyed this.
As success begat success, things got more complex and harder to manage. New sites, ranges, markets, channels, acquisitions, systems, partners and competitors – whilst still needing to manage the old. Duplication, silos, delays, workarounds and a rise in working capital and indirect cost all followed.
Over the last few months, we have met many manufacturing organisations across the globe – of these, the most common question has been, ‘How can we even see what’s going on across the different parts of our business, let alone optimise it?’ The tail is wagging the dog – the complexity of the operation feels like it is now often driving the overall customer proposition, rather than serving it.
The desire to improve agility, competitiveness, profitability, environmental impact and regulatory compliance is being hindered by fragmented data sitting across multiple OpCos, systems and processes. Much focus and investment has been made on creating a single view of customers through deployment of CRM and sales management – but without the same attention on the operational data which is the lifeblood of the business.
This article will explore the challenges and impacts of bringing together the core data of products, stock, prices and orders, and share some examples of how InspireXT have pragmatically helped manufacturers and retailers rediscover their customer-centricity.
Product: traceability and provenance
Traceability has been a hot topic for some time. It’s always been so for industries such as pharmaceuticals, where batch level production control is critical to ensure patient safety and compliance. Now, with the advent of initiatives such as the European Union’s Digital Product Passport, being able to demonstrate to customers the provenance and environmental footprint of the finished product and its component parts, this is rapidly becoming a must have across industries as diverse as fashion, electronics, and even food.
And as we move towards a circular economy, this level of component level visibility and traceability and end of life information is clearly a foundational capability that all organisations, large and small, will need to adopt over time.
For most organisations, this is going to be tough. It’s hard enough collating the operational data, the technical data and now the customer facing copy and images on the finished product from within your own organisation, let alone across the various organisations and different levels of sophistication within the value chain.
Internally, the organisational processes and systems are siloed – even more so where acquisitions have been used to grow the business. R&D, manufacturing, supplier audits, operations, marketing, sales all have part of the product picture, but viewed through different lenses. Externally, data standards, technological abilities, time zones, and levels of responsiveness add to that complexity, compounded by difficulties in isolating batch specific details from a multi-supplied stock.
Inventory and orders: meeting B2B and D2C demand in real-time
Now, let’s talk about inventory — often the lifeblood of manufacturing but also a frequent source of headaches. In the fast-paced world of manufacturing, inventory levels can change rapidly. A single delay in material can throw off your production and demand schedule, leading to missed deadlines, frustrated customers, and lost revenue. Imagine a scenario where a key component is unexpectedly out of stock just as a big order comes in.
You’re left scrambling, potentially disappointing a valued client and damaging your reputation in the process. However, with real-time inventory visibility, and early warning of potential disruptions, your system can automatically adjust delivery timelines or offer alternative products, ensuring you keep production running smoothly.
Also, finished goods inventory is sometimes trapped within a particular silo aligned to a specific site or sales channel. Working capital costs rise as inventory is used to protect service levels and production schedules, as it is duplicated across channels.
Manufacturers have the chance to replicate learnings from retailers who have been delivering omni-channel order management for more than 15 years. As manufacturers add direct to consumer to their existing sales channels, the same service and efficiency requirement arises – how to connect orders from any channel to inventory held in any site in a seamless way, and how to ensure all orders achieve their on-time in full promise. This maximises customer order choice, minimises lead times, and reduces the level of working capital held in channel specific silos.
Pricing: staying competitive in a volatile market
Now, let’s address pricing – a crucial aspect that can make or break your competitive edge. In manufacturing, pricing isn’t just about setting numbers – it’s as much about maintaining consistency across channels as driving operational efficiencies while responding to volatile market conditions.
Across significant bill of materials, with some long lead time items, multi-source options, differing inventory shelf-lives, and customer specific contracts and pricing dynamics, this is complex. Even more so as we consider the rise of subscription services – where a long-term price commitment is made against an uncertain supply landscape. Many organisations have turned to CPQ (Configure Price Quote) engines to handle this complexity, creating consistency across sales channels and markets, and creating traceability throughout the quoting to fulfilment processes.
But even here, the CPQ engine can be disconnected from the latest operational reality causing financial or customer damage. Pricing may not reflect scarce component levels; ‘profitable to promise’ is not taken into account, often overlooking the true cost of sourcing; and unrealistic order promises made which undermine trust or trigger unplanned and uncosted remedial work.
About InspireXT
InspireXT is a UK-based consulting firm, specialising in delivering customer centric supply chain transformations, powered by technology. We understand the unique challenges that manufacturers face in bringing together the core data of products, stock, prices, and orders due to fragmented data sitting across multiple OpCos, systems, and processes.
Our solution centric Common Process Model (CPM) offers a comprehensive solution bringing that data into a unified view, mapping the processes and data required to create a singular operational view. With real-time insights and streamlined processes, our platform helps you optimise production, manage inventory more effectively, and maintain consistent pricing across all channels. Embedded Generative AI provides an easy way of finding new patterns and insights across the complex operational landscape that can be used to service either internal or external customers of that data.
To help manufacturers deliver seamless pricing to fulfilment, InspireXT has extended its Common Process Model to incorporate the CPQ processes and data, enabling connectivity to the latest inventory, order and pricing data, so that accurate, realistic and profitable prices can be set consistently across channels which are able to respond to market changes.
This Common Process Model is flexible enough to be deployed in very different contexts. For example, we helped a UK based multinational pharmaceutical manufacturer, deliver full product batch traceability with FDA approval as part of a global digital transformation programme. This programme included a designing and deploying a cloud-based ERP solution spanning from finance to manufacturing, with continuous computer system validation service necessary for pharmaceutical manufacturers. Hear more about this story in the latest edition of the Manufacturer’s Archive Podcast – ARCHIVES: Gemma Ferris & Manish Popli – The Manufacturer).
By contrast, a vertically integrated luxury retail client has used the Common Process Model to build a luxury omni-channel customer experience. This includes an online product passport that delivers enhanced traceability and provenance for customers, tracing the individual item from its source to the customer sale, in store or online. This traceability spans a complex process across countries, operating companies, systems (including SAP, Oracle and Salesforce) and processes, and is based on a cloud product hub which masters and manages a complex product hierarchy, with effective data governance processes around it.
Furthermore, they have been able to open up their global stock locations to any orders in store customers, online customers or wholesale customers, ensuring that any customer can order anything, from anywhere, via any channel with the same experience. This has helped them better manage and orchestrate their global fulfilment and improve order conversion by 30%, whilst enabling new levels of customer service, and also especially helping with the global growth and business transformation.
InspireXT is on a mission to build the most trusted customer centric supply chains and believe that this starts with pragmatic advice from experienced people who are invested in building transparent long-term relationships. Get in touch with me at [email protected] if you’d like to discuss or to explore a rapid proof of concept of the Common Process Model with your data to demonstrate the power of a connected supply chain. To find out more visit: marketing.inspirext.com/6H3iA.
Since then, InspireXT has been working with manufacturers and retailers to deliver digital transformations, and has expanded to operations in Europe, North America, the Middle East and India. Kuldeep has worked across manufacturing industries previously, and is renowned for his pragmatic supply chain expertise.
