Over the past 30 years, supply chains all around the world made a shift from localized production and distribution to true globalism. And in the process, people all around the world gained access to a wider variety of products at ever-lowering prices.
Since then, global supply chains have faced unprecedented disruptions. It’s led to product shortages, shipping delays, and retailers scrambling to find alternative suppliers to keep their shelves stocked. But it has also forced logistics companies to work overtime trying to make the most of their hobbled shipping capacities.
The solution that many are turning to is to place a renewed focus on quality assurance throughout the supply chain. The idea behind it is to reduce the proportion of supply chain resources wasted on products moving through the chain that don’t lead to positive customer outcomes. And it’s just what the doctor ordered in these uncertain times. Here’s why.
Global Supply Chains Changed the Locus of Quality Assurance
For most of the 20th century, businesses relied on local suppliers for products. These were often run by people whom the business owners knew and trusted. And in any event, supply chains were small and relatively simple, making problems easy to spot and correct. But today’s supply chains stretch across the globe. They’re made up of participants who have little to no contact with one another, with logistics firms essentially serving as middlemen for networks of subcontractors.
And that means that it’s no longer retailers who have direct control over the process that brings a product from a factory into the hands of the consumer. It’s up to the logistics firms in the middle. And to do it, they must work to achieve visibility that stretches from the production process through the arrival of the product in a retail shop or on a customer’s doorstep.
But even when everything’s going well, it’s hard to make sure that the processes that make up a product’s path to the customer work well. And businesses had learned to tolerate some level of waste within those processes. Today, however, supply chains are overstretched, and there’s no more room for error.
How Supply Chain Quality Assurance Processes Can Help
In reaction to the present market conditions, logistics companies — and to a lesser degree, individual retailers — are going all-in on supply chain quality assurance. By doing so, they’re acting to assert greater control over the product procurement cycle and eliminate wasted logistics resources. And to understand why, you must first understand what supply chain quality assurance means.
In practice, supply chain quality assurance refers to the process that businesses undertake to achieve visibility into product procurement, from production to delivery, to refine those processes to make them efficient and successful. In other words, it involves using available technologies to look for procedural factors that lead to waste — think poor packaging that leads to product damage or inconsistent environmental conditions in storage or transport — at every phase of the product procurement cycle.
Supply chain quality assurance helps logistics firms to create the conditions necessary to get undamaged products where they need to go without fail every single time. And in an era where supply chain capacity is still at the mercy of an ongoing pandemic — that’s a key prerequisite for customer satisfaction.
Poor Supply Chain Performance Means Unhappy Customers
For businesses, the growing trend toward supply chain quality assurance should be something of relief amid the recent tumultuous years. After all, consumers don’t blame product producers or logistics companies when they either can’t find a product in stock or it doesn’t meet their expectations — they blame retailers. And those outcomes are particularly damaging.
A pre-pandemic survey indicated that 39% of consumers have left a store after finding a product out of stock. And then they’ve taken their business elsewhere — possibly for good. And that tendency has made the past few years particularly challenging for brick-and-mortar businesses. And they weren’t the only ones facing problems.
Plenty of eCommerce businesses struggled to scale up to meet their pandemic-era demand and instead ended up damaging customer relationships by overtaxing their logistics operations. That just led to damaged products arriving at people’s doorsteps — if they ever arrived at all. And many of them are still trying to recover from it as of the time of this writing.
The Bottom Line
The main takeaway, then, is there’s a direct correlation between successful efforts at supply chain quality assurance and happy customers. It helps to remove as many impediments to repeatable and effective product procurement and delivery as possible. That means retailers can prevent out-of-stocks, and customers experience fewer delivery and product quality issues when they make online purchases. Plus, it lowers costs both for businesses and consumers.
In other words, supply chain quality assurance is the perfect balm for what ails global supply chains right now. And it’s something that every supply chain participant — be they producers, logistics specialists, or retailers — should seize on to help them get back on track after a nightmarish few years.
