Six opportunity recommendations for non-opportunistic suppliers.

Six opportunity recommendations for non-opportunistic suppliers.

 

The current health crisis of coronavirus is having a supply chain crisis in various industries among its consequences. Here I give 6 clues to face the situation as an opportunity.

 

This generates a number of short-term opportunities that some suppliers are ruthlessly exploiting. However, I believe that an opportunity is opening up for us to recover and relaunch lasting relationships with customers if we approach it by focusing in a collaborative and intelligent way.

 

Over the past 20 years, many industries have moved their sources of supply and production from their traditional markets in Western Europe and North America to more competitive markets (largely due to labor costs). Perhaps it is time to review.

 

As we all know, it’s not all about low prices in relationship between customers and suppliers. The current market is gaining speed in changes in demand and preferences by the end customer in many sectors such as retail, electronics, manufacturing, packaging… This is why an opportunity is presented for proximity suppliers to demonstrate competitiveness by increasing the value proposition for the customer, without the need to be “cheap”.

 

 

Here are the 6 successful attitudes:

1) Attitude How can I help you: be receptive to listening to the customer’s needs and how we can give them a solution. Giving short-term solutions will open the doors to show that we are capable as a supplier.

 

2) Flexibility and adaptation: It is important to provide these values, this is one of the axes that will differentiate the most from competition in so-called low-cost countries. The ability to work online to customer demand and when required will open up fields of customer competitiveness related to improving their working capital, reducing risks of obsolescence and reacting to changes in demand that are difficult to comparable by distant suppliers. This will open up opportunities to increase value to the customer with VMI (Vendor Managed Inventory), JIT (Just inTime), 0 stock, in house…

 

3) Bringing more Value: Being close to customers will enable us to extend ourselves as a supplier in the value chain by helping to simplify the supply chain (consolidating Tier 2 and 3 suppliers), offering additional operations such as product finishing, direct sending to end customer with customer brand etc.

 

4) Integration into new developments: If we offer customers the integration of own resources in their new product development processes we will enable important synergies in terms of reducing development times, better adaptation to existing industrial processes and efficient designs from the outset and reduction of redundancies in the organization.

5) Integration of information systems: If we enable integration with customer information systems we will take advantage of the analytical and predictive demand capabilities of customers, at the same time we will enable the robotization of multiple administrative processes such as orders, invoicing, collections, planning, inventory management, transportation management etc.

 

6) Selling reliability and risk reduction: proximity, transparency, system integration and collaborative attitude is a very powerful value that will generate loyalty loops for our customers who can hardly break “cheap” competitors.

In short, it is important to demonstrate to customers the additional and differential value they will have in a new collaborative relationship framework and that a long-distance supplier will hardly be able to match.

 

This is an opportunity to prove value and relaunch the business.