A seasoned marketing leader with 15+ years of experience in brand building and enterprise marketing, Jigyasa Kishore is the Senior Director, Brand, Growth & Excellence at Moglix; one of the pioneers in digital supply chain transformation in India. Jigyasa Kishore brings proven expertise in enterprise technology sales & marketing, technology portfolio management, B2B commerce, digital supply chain networks, global sourcing and distribution, brand partnerships, key account management, and revenue expansion. During her illustrious career, she has enabled large enterprises in technology, information, and mass media verticals to traverse the transformation journey through internal process reengineering, brand building, and enterprise growth initiatives with her technology-first approach.
Indian manufacturing has announced a comeback. It makes for a fascinating case study on the responsiveness and resiliency of our supply chain. India’s manufacturing PMI has skyrocketed from 51.8 in March 2020 to scale the 8-year peak of 57.7 in March 2021. Five to six years ago, this would have seemed unlikely. However, after successive policy initiatives like the GST, Digital India, and Make in India that aimed at hammering away roadblocks to the ease of doing business, here we are. What has enabled Indian manufacturers to stage such a strong comeback in such a short window of time? The answer is supply chain digitization. From responding to the changing contours of the customer journey, customer experience, shifting demand patterns, to stakeholder collaboration, and risk management, supply chain digitization has allowed Indian manufacturers to change gears quickly and hit the ground running. An analysis of supply chain digitization tells us more about the technology levers that Indian enterprises have leveraged thus far and the road they should take to make Indian manufacturing self-reliant.
Replicating the Onsite Customer Journey in an Online Ecosystem with E-Commerce
India’s legacy manufacturing supply chain has always seen technology enablement constrained to less than 2% levels. However, over the past five to six years, the scenario has gradually changed. Startups, MSME suppliers, and Indian OEMs have enrolled into e-commerce platforms and slowly replicated and rebuild the onsite customer journey block by block in the online ecosystem. Indian enterprises have found new ways to collaborate with MSME suppliers for procurement, have access to close substitutes of industrial goods, reduce the downtime on the factory floor, and manufacture and distribute relevant products to customers, even in the face of adversities.
Personalizing the Customer Experience in B2B Commerce with Feature-Rich Mobile App
There has been a significant shift from offline to online procurement in B2B commerce in recent years. The combination of great coding talent, end-to-end supply chain design, and a user-experience first approach has culminated in the adoption and growth of mobile commerce in enterprise procurement. Mobile applications for B2B commerce have enabled supply chain professionals to access a diversified and inclusive supplier base, browse supplier catalogs, and place orders from the convenience of their smartphones with just a few clicks.
Navigating Across Shifting Demand Patterns with Dynamic Product Catalog
In times of uncertainty, enterprises often shift to procuring essential industrial supplies in bulk quantities and reducing their non-essential items. Given the volume of line items on the procurement lists and the geographical spread of multiplant manufacturers, such shifts in demand patterns translate into highly complex requirements of multiple assembly lines, product lines, and batches. However, several Indian supply chain solutions providers have leveraged dynamic product cataloging to replace, remove, and replenish product codes in accordance with the evolving contours of customers’ demands. The switch from static to dynamic product catalogs accompanied by clean master data integration with physical servers of legacy ERP applications has resulted in accurate demand mapping and just-in-time delivery of made-to-order industrial goods.
Migrating from Sequential to Concurrent Collaboration with Cloud-Hosted Platforms
Traditionally, India’s manufacturing enterprises followed offline supply chain processes and relied on fragmented supply chain data sets hosted on spreadsheets. As a result, the mode and nature of collaboration among stakeholders were sequential. They often involved a time lag between successive levels in the supply chain ecosystem. The sequential collaboration limited visibility into KPIs, raised the risk exposure, and increased the turnaround time of processes. However, cloud-based applications have made a difference to the supply chain ecosystem. The adoption of cloud-hosted platforms has enabled manufacturers to migrate from sequential to concurrent collaboration. Many of them have moved away from static RFQ and RFP processes that are slow and brought the turnaround time to 3 days to resolve upstream and downstream challenges faster.
Leveraging Data Analytics, AI, and ML to Get Visibility into the Road Ahead
The success of Indian manufacturing enterprises in effecting a fast rebound offers a powerful lesson on supply chain risk management. Risk management cannot happen through offline and static data frameworks, especially at times of supply chain disruptions when there is plenty of fast-paced incremental information on the supply chain landscape’s changing contours. While technology applications like data analytics, robotic process automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning were efficiency levers for Indian enterprises, these have become levers of resilience, agility, and de-risking now. Leveraging clean data has enabled Indian enterprises to map the cost, risk, and innovation drivers in the upstream and downstream of the supply chain. Indian enterprises have used prescriptive and predictive artificial intelligence to share risks with their suppliers, logistics service providers, and pick-up and drop-off centers.
Enabling Seamless Tracking of the Supply Chain Journey from a Single Window
Supply chain disruptions can blur the differences among short, intermediate, and long terms and compress planning horizons to the point of redundancy. Several Indian manufacturers have switched from using multiple applications and platforms for running multiple processes in the procurement cycle to a single-window order-to-delivery operating system. It has allowed them to establish a centralized governance platform, access all their data such as suppliers, SKUs, and KPIs like lowest cost and expected time of arrival from a single platform, and stay in control of the end-to-end supply chain journey. E-procurement applications with functionalities to sort, access, share and edit data on a single page of any device like PC, notebook, or mobile, have enabled Indian enterprises to track the entire order to delivery journey from anywhere and at any time, thus making the supply chain experience genuinely seamless.
New Frontiers of Supply Chain Digitization: Consolidate Processes and Differentiate Products
In the post-pandemic world, enterprises will have to deploy service integration and management in the supply chain digitization framework. SIAM capabilities will allow Indian enterprises to manage multiple suppliers for businesses, consolidate processes, platforms, and supplier portfolios, differentiate products, and make their supply chain more responsive.