Supply Chain Reform

Situation

Our Client has been exploring options for improving the effectiveness and efficiency of its supply operations.  The business now seeks support in quickly reviewing the end-to-end supply chain and developing an approach that will radically simplify the operating model, improve performance and provide the right platform for the future needs of the business.

The project will answer key questions such as which product groups should be manufactured in-house and which should be outsourced, and create a shared fact-base for the business to finalise their decision making, define the future business model and move into implementation to deliver the new way of working – including outsourcing of certain activities and performance improvements to retained activities.

Approach

The objective of the Rapid Supply Chain Opportunity Assessment was to quickly scope the impact of restructuring of the manufacturing & supply chain and to recommend a competitive product supply strategy for core product groups.  Working with the client team:

  • Take unconstrained view
  • ‘Quick & Dirty’ study to get 80/20 answer fast
  • Focused on product manufacture & supply options for core product groups
  • Logistics optimisation for end-to-end supply chain

The work was hypothesis-driven and fact-based, but above all pragmatic and fast-moving reflecting the limited resource and time available for the project. Thus we took advantage of existing analysis from within the group and rely on support from the Client team in gathering, analysing and drawing conclusions from the data.

The analysis will brought together the following Building Blocks to support decision making:

  • Current and forecast financial and operational performance per Product Group (PG)
  • End-to-end supply chain overview for each product group
  • High-level supply chain cost model at typical product level
  • Supply market analysis for key product groups
  • Request for Information outputs to provide detailed profiles of potential suppliers including capabilities, current customers, cost competitiveness, quality performance, etc.
  • Accreditation of a selected subset of suppliers to provide confidence that they are credible providers of the required products
  • Realistic price points for product supply. The formal RfP process will follow this project

Results

The Make Buy analysis confirmed the opportunity to create an outsourced production base for our Client and estimates that a significant EBITDA increase would result from this change of around £7-8m.
Through three work streams – supplier engagement, cost reduction programme & cost modelling we compared outsourced prices to optimised ‘could cost’ internal production costs for our Client’s product groups.
Several ‘do anyway’ cost & profit improvement initiatives emerged – including a significant SKU rationalisation opportunity and several cost reduction actions which have been  implemented
Two output analyses were produced:
  • ‘Make vs. Buy’ comparison showing that optimised internal costs are still higher than outsourced costs
  • A fully built up scenario where production is outsourced to estimate the resulting EBITDA impact
We went onto further broaden the outsourced supplier base through more site audits in EU and Asia, continuing negotiations with potential suppliers & updating cost model – as well as developing an operating model and transition plan for the outsourced ‘traded’ business model