Improve communication in supply chain is essential for managing internal teams, growers, suppliers, and distributors. It will allow you to be more productive, track your progress better, and reduce the risk of making significant mistakes. Communication problems can cause delays in deliveries, stock shortages, and even food safety issues.
Transparency in Your Team is essential to improve communication in supply chain
The top management holds too much information about the supply chain. Be honest to ensure that all stakeholders feel respected and included in important management decisions. Discuss with your team where you are experiencing bottlenecks.
Discuss Key Metrics
Your key supplier metrics, such as quality, freshness, and cost, should be established and communicated to suppliers every quarter. Notify suppliers promptly of changes to your menus that could affect your priorities. To give customers a better understanding of your key metrics, connect them to create a bigger picture.
Find out how your suppliers measure success. Although you don’t necessarily need to track truck deployments or crop yields, these factors can ripple effect on your chain.
Be proactive
Do not wait until a crisis occurs to raise concerns about your supply chain’s ability to meet demand. Establish open, ongoing communication with suppliers about their tracking capabilities and the plan of action each party has for stock withdrawals.
Talk about how consumer preferences drive demand and how increasing consumer quality standards leads you to seek more information from suppliers. Learn what suppliers are saying to you and whether they are seeing trends influencing their business practices.
Strategically
A lack of demand visibility primarily causes the disruptive bullwhip effect. Today, Web-based wholesale trading platforms such as ListTrader, which offer invoicing tools, trading software, and supplier management technology, help wholesalers and distributors streamline merchandise trade with multiple-bid management and best price algorithms. They also provide data and dashboards that are clean and organized.
Knowledge is power. If you want to increase efficiency, consistency, and quality in your supply chain, then increasing access to demand and inventory data and information on product sourcing can help to grow your business.