On October 28 and 29th, 2019, SDI will join over 250 like-minded procurement and maintenance professionals to discuss strategies to modernize MRO spend, to gain more spend under management, and to benchmark against other companies. SDI is the premier sponsor of the second annual ProcureCon MRO event, the only conference solely dedicated to the advancement of maintenance, repair, and operations.
SDI’s own Tom Barrett, Senior Director of Administrative Services and Client Solutions, will be the master of ceremonies for day one, kicking off the event with the keynote speech. His presentation titled, Accelerating Change: Identifying Cross-Functional Resources to Fix Your MRO Supply Chain, talks about:
- The fundamental shift in current leadership structures
- Operating processes
- Information flows that are required in order to take advantage of transformative change in the digital supply chain
The traditional role of procurement is to find the low-hanging fruit through sourcing projects and Requests for Proposals (RFPs). The general thinking is that running RFPs continually motivates suppliers to sharpen their pencils. However, RFPs are typically written once and rarely revisited for new objectives and outcomes. This results in an RFP cycle that doesn’t continually meet your objectives. Being ahead of technology and working with suppliers who are in the know will help you lead the change and stay ahead of the digital disruptions that are shifting our economy. The smartest procurement people are the ones who understand that they don’t know what they don’t know—the ones who lean on the industry for market intelligence.
In order to truly accelerate the digital transformation, organizations will need to stay ahead of innovation through creative procurement practices, such as utilizing creative Requests for Solutions in addition to leveraging a supply chain analysis to gain visibility into the MRO supply chain. Conducting site tours, gathering data for analysis, and conducting interviews with key stakeholders helps bridge functional siloes and identify what is going well and where there’s room for improvement.
Supply chain audit keys
The key areas to consider in a supply chain audit and when making the business case for transformative change include:
- Data management: Everyone is impacted by data, from maintenance and planners, to receiving and procurement. Increasing transparency and consistency in data is the key to delivering meaningful insights and data-driven action plans.
- Source to pay: What does the process look like from sourcing to procurement to the storeroom through accounts payable?
- Receiving, storeroom, and inventory management: How is your organization ensuring parts availability to support reliable production and proactive maintenance?
- Enterprise asset management and reliability: How much unplanned downtime can be reduced through parts availability and predictive inventory planning?
The supply chain audit helps you evolve your relationships with your existing and potential service providers, and as you do so, the value that they can create for you becomes greater. They are the experts in their field, and they should be the best sources for identifying what opportunities are there to leverage now and what still needs to evolve a little bit before it makes sense to consider for your business.
Benefits of utilizing the supply chain audit
The more you can move up the supply chain ecosystem from reliability, to price, to performance, to truly driving innovation and value, the better off your organization will be. Your supply chain doesn’t start at your storeroom, and your supplier network doesn’t stop at your front door. Taking a full view and leveraging a supply chain assessment to evaluate potential partners beyond just price comparison will enable you to:
- Work more effectively
- Stimulate collaboration
- Maximize responsiveness
- Improve performance
SDI is the premier sponsor at ProcureCon MRO and is hosting a practitioner cocktail reception after the close of day one. For an invitation and to chat with Tom, visit www2.sdi.com/ProcureConMRO. Additionally, SDI is offering private demos of their ZEUS technology to practitioners who send sample data ahead of time. To take advantage of this offer and schedule time in Studio ZEUS at the show, contact us today.
