4 Factors Supply Chain businesses in Kenya and Uganda need to compete internationally

The Supply Chain industry is fast-growing in Uganda, Kenya, and the rest of the East and Sub-Saharan region. However, many businesses in this industry are still falling short and hence ruining their profitability. This is mainly because they begin and operate without the proper strategy or tools.

In this detailed post, we go into detail on 4 factors that can help Kenyan, Uganda, and African businesses become a success and compete internationally.

1. Advanced planning

End-to-end planning is essential to drive profitable, sustainable growth. Navigating the challenges associated with evolving product portfolios, dynamic markets, unavoidable constraints, and expanding networks creates a dizzying array of go-to-market options—and a widening gap between getting it done and getting it right.

Infor’s integrated planning suite (distributed by Flaxem in East Africa) synchronizes supply and demand, balancing customer expectations and business goals. Modular applications target key sources of complexity, leveraging a common platform to harmonize operations and strategy.

Advanced algorithms support demand sensing and supply planning, inventory, and production planning, all to identify the best use of assets and optimize performance. Infor® Integrated Business Planning goes beyond traditional sales and operations planning (S&OP) to enable a holistic perspective to align the entire organization in order to deliver overall business improvement. Having the appropriate systems in place to optimize inventory levels without sacrificing service levels is essential to remaining competitive in today’s marketplace.

2. Supplier engagement

Nowadays, supplier relationships require more transparency and collaboration than ever before. Businesses have long struggled with complex supply chain orchestration due to siloed systems and disconnected, manual processes slowing down communication and straining supplier relationships.

Our all-in-one business solution provides a single point of engagement with contract manufacturers and suppliers for processes from plan to pay. This allows trading partners to share and align digitally on plans, forecasts, and orders to foresee early warnings of potential issues and help assure supply. By improving logistics at every point of a supply chain—beginning at origin, with solutions that automate supplier packing, labeling, and shipping processes—you gain the visibility needed to manage upstream and downstream supply flows, ensuring efficiency across the entire value chain.

With our supply chain software solutions, you can generate advance shipping notices to streamline receiving at DCs and warehouses as well as ensure packing and labeling accuracy to enable direct ship and cross-dock programs.

Finally, our supply chain software solutions allow companies to fuse the physical and financial supply chain through automation of the entire procure-to-pay process. This means a company can simplify order collaboration and management, invoice management, and global payment and chargeback management. By being able to automatically induce settlements to improve cash flow visibility and working capital, organizations free up their talent to work on more value-added tasks.

3. Legacy WMS is outdated and doesn’t meet today’s needs

Warehousing challenges such as omnichannel availability, SKU proliferation, and the need for expanded, value-add services place enormous stress on operations. The rising costs of fulfillment accompanied by increasing complex task requirements are driving the need to transform the warehouse. It’s time to give warehouse operators and personnel the tools they need to succeed.

Unfortunately, aging warehouse systems lack the functionality needed for agile fulfillment, just-in-time (JIT) inventory, and the dynamic workforce management available in modern WMS applications. Yet many organizations -especially in Africa, are hesitant to adopt new systems due to an anticipated difficulty of managing the complex technology stack that supports a modern warehouse.

Flaxem offers a configurable, cloud-based warehouse management system to leverage automation, increase efficiency, improve responsiveness, and reduce complexities. An intuitive solution, Infor WMS manages activities, combining core and advanced warehousing activities with embedded labor management, activity-based costing (ABC) analytics, billing and invoicing, transportation schedules, and 3D visual analysis all in a unified application.

Infor WMS introduces elasticity in the supply chain.
It manages Supply Chain decoupling point preventing deviations to cascade down or up the supply chain.

4. Using the cloud to empower flexibility

In today’s complex business ecosystem, moving business applications to the cloud is essential. That’s because cloud-based applications are continuously updated with functionality and technology infrastructure to keep pace of digital business transformation. By moving the applications to support essential supply chain processes to the cloud, organizations gain:

infor crm

  • Accessibility: Access business data from anywhere using any device: desktop, smartphone, or tablet.
  • Scalability & elasticity: Accommodate operational needs as they grow or handle peak
    or seasonal requirements easily
  • Security: Ensure that only appropriate users and partners have access to the information needed
    for their roles
  • Insight: Connect data across the operation both inside and outside your enterprise for insights
    and monitoring critical KPIs
  • Extensibility: Leverage API-driven integrations to quickly and easily connect new applications
    and new supply chain partners
  • Innovation: Keep pace with industry changes and best practices, and position yourself
    for future needs

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