Why do we need
Supply Chain Intelligence?
Modern supply chains face unprecedented pressures. A highly competitive labor market, rising inflation, rapidly evolving consumer demand, significant technological advances, and a push for increased sustainability have garnered attention from most supply chains. These changes, combined with highly unpredictable events such as natural disasters, pandemics, global strikes, and new regulations require new levels of supply chain agility.
The major challenge to achieving supply chain agility is level and quality of data needed to provide a unified view of all aspects of the supply chain. Absent this unified view, organizations are ”flying blind” and are at a significant disadvantage to those that have these capabilities.
To succeed, organizations needs the ability to see activities across all nodes of the supply chain in real-time. Adding forward-looking capabilities through analytics enable operators to run scenarios and build proactive measures to deal with disruption. However, a recent CIPS & Deloitte report found that only 13% of companies have achieved end-to-end visibility in their supply chain.
To assist organizations in assessing their level of maturity in achieving end-to-end visibility, NCS Partners developed a maturity assessment survey. Want to learn your supply chain visibility maturity level? Take the survey here.
In response to the urgent need of organizations seeking to improve their supply chain visibility capabilities, NCS Partners built a comprehensive set of services we call Supply Chain Intelligence (SCI).
What is NCS Partners Supply Chain Intelligence (SCi)?
NCS Partners created the Supply Chain Intelligence practice area to focus on the needs of organizations needing improved data visibility to drive measurable results and better decision making across all platforms. SCi Services are not sequential, offering you various entry points based on your unique needs.
SC Visibility Roadmap services builds on your organization’s business needs and industry best practices to create a set of prioritized programs and projects, Organizations that have yet to capitalize of digitization or lack the information to perform progressive analysis will benefit from developing a strategic roadmap.
Sustainability & ESG Strategy services assist organizations in defining sustainability goals, understanding reporting and data needs, creation of business cases and development of an integrated sustainability roadmap.
Data Assessment services provide a comprehensive review of your organization’s supply chain data environment. We benchmark your data architecture and usage patterns against industry best practices, then use this with your specified business goals to develop a data foundation roadmap to guide investments in supply chain data & analytics.
Supply Chain Data Repository services assist you in the design, platform selection (if appropriate), development and deployment of a supply chain data repository. Leveraging our unified supply chain data model, we supported repository types including modern data warehouse, data mart, data lake, and digital twins.
Data Analytics services work with business users and IT professionals to define the data ecosystem, reporting, ands analytic needed to meet business goals. This includes reporting, dashboards, visualizations, data exploration, alerting, and AI/ML models.
System Integration services provide assistance in building or deploying specific solutions to meet your supply chain visibility needs. NCS Partners has relationships with many of the industry’s leading providers and can provide system integrations services to meet your needs.
NCS Partners supports all of its services with its SPEAR continuous improvement methodology. SPEAR provides the process and metrics that ensure your investments in new technologies evolve and remain relevant to business users.
How is SCi by NCS different than SC service
offerings from other providers?
NCS Partners prides itself on being a trusted advisor to our customers. We value our customer’s time and resources and developed a survey-based assessment model that is at the core of our SCi services. Our survey models ensure consistent and accurate capture of organization thoughts and sentiments.
This begins with our Supply Chain Visibility Maturity Assessment. The Maturity Assessment measures organization’s maturity in supply chain visibility disciplines including vision & strategy, data environment, operations, analytics, and compliance & risk. The Maturity Assessment produces a comprehensive report showing organizations how they compare to peer organizations as well as where they are in the maturity curve. We maintain the privacy of all organizations that take the survey. The resulting database provides invaluable information regarding best practices and the state of supply visibility across industries.
To take the supply chain visibility maturity assessment
click here.
Our assessments are grounded in industry best practices and are designed to capture relevant data to ensure interviews and workshops are focused on your organizations most critical supply chain issues. The matrix below shows our assessments by service and the associated workshops. Mousing over an assessment will provide a more detailed description.
Supply Chain Visibility
Roadmap
The Visibility Roadmap Assessment identifies areas of clarity and ambiguity in the organization’s SC strategy. Output from the survey drives interview questions and is reviewed in a SCV Visioning Workshop.
Sustainability & ESG
Strategy
The Sustainability and ESG Maturity Assessment performs a deep dive into your organization’s planning and execution processes to assess a current level of maturity in incorporating sustainability and ESG into day-to-day operations
SCi Services
SCi Data
Assessment
The SC Data Assessment pinpoints detailed opportunities and areas of concern with organizational data to be explored during interviews and later reviewed in a Data Visioning Workshop.
SCi Data
Repository
The SCi Data Repository Needs Assessment expands on the Data Assessment to assist in defining the optimal architecture and toolsets needed to deliver a database solution that will be the foundation for supply chain analytics.
SCi
Analytics
The Data Analytics Needs Assessment identifies areas of opportunity existing in key supply chain decisions. The assessment examines the breadth, depth, accuracy and timeliness of supporting reporting and analytics.
Survey results feed the Data Analytics Roadmap Workshop.
SCi Systems
Integration
The SCi Systems Integration Needs Assessment varies based on the type of solution to be developed and/or deployed. The assessment seeks to elicit the top-level requirements for the solution(s) that will be used to structure design and configuration workshops.
