Understanding Supply Chain Challenges with Real-Time Insights
In today’s global economy, ensuring products are delivered safely and on time is crucial. At DS Smith we are exploring multiple solutions that offer visibility into your supply chain, enabling you to uncover your supply chain challenges and opportunities.
What are the most pressing challenges of supply chain management in 2024?
Supply chain disruptions are becoming increasingly common and costly, creating multi-billion-dollar challenges for industries worldwide, such as:
Failures in cold chain management lead to enormous financial losses in the food industry, with 620m tons of food products wasted annually due to improper temperature control.
Theft and loss are pressing issues across industries, with 35% of firms planning to introduce technologies for item-level tracking and traceability to reduce losses.
Time-sensitive deliveries can result in significant fines for companies, totaling more than $5bn annually in the US.
Product damage during transit is an ongoing issue, with around 11% of unit loads arriving at distribution centers showing some level of damage, estimated at around $260Bn annually.
How can real-time product visibility benefit the food and electronic industries?
Gaining real-time visibility into your supply chain, particularly for food and electronics companies, could provide numerous tangible benefits:
- Waste reduction by avoiding temperature breaches
- Reduced concession costs due to lost or damaged goods
- Control of sensitive or high-profile new product launches and samples
- Locating missing products
- Verifying external supply chain conditions
- Identifying issues & opportunities
- Education of the wider supply chain on issues in the network
- Live detection of supply chain issues
- Visibility over the logistics route
Join our product visibility trials!
If these opportunities and challenges resonate with you, fill out the form below to learn more! We are trialling our product visibility solutions with existing and new customers in the food, electronics, and industrial sectors, particularly SMEs in Europe shipping to EMEA or the US.
Why partner with us?
Over the years, we have successfully helped over 60 clients improve their packaging through our expertise in supply chain optimisation, in the ParceLive PACE programme. Our approach involves tailoring sensor solutions to meet the specific needs of our clients. By partnering with leading technology providers, we ensure that our clients have access to the right tools to address their challenges. Moreover, we don't just provide data; we assist in turning insights into sustainable and efficient solutions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Supply chain challenges and disruptions can come from small events, such as site labour shortages, or as large global impacts, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Supply chain disruptions are becoming increasingly common and costly, creating multi-billion-dollar challenges for industries worldwide.
There are multiple indicators of supply chain challenges: from logistical issues (e.g., inventory imbalances, fines due to OTIF decrease), supplier feedback (e.g., delayed deliveries, high error rates) and customer complaints (e.g., regarding damaged goods).
Supply chain disruption can impact businesses of all sizes as well as consumers. When businesses cannot deliver products or services, this impacts their revenue and can lead to decline in customers’ trust and brand damage. In addition, the final consumers can suffer greatly if the affected products or services are essential such as medicine.
Businesses need to build resilient supply chains that can be flexible and react to challenges or disruptions quickly. This can be addressed with specific measures, such as diversifying the supplier base, considering reshoring and nearshoring, and having an agile logistics system. In addition, having the right tools that capture real-life data to help diagnose supply chain challenges builds resilience into the supply chain, so when an incident occurs, the company is ready to respond and solve it.
Starting by defining key performance metrics related to the company’s priorities, on quality and accuracy of delivery. By regularly analysing real-time data captured by smart sensors within the supply chain, companies can spot trends or anomalies highlighting areas that may need support and improvements.