The missing link

By Mikael Nilsson, Minimpex

Minimpex’s founder Mikael Nilsson outlines the basic fundamentals of the supply chain and how fully understanding your company’s supply chain can maximise profitability and customer satisfaction.

“As it's much cheaper to keep an existing customer than to get a new one, the interaction part is important to generate future business.”
-Mikael Nilsson

A supply chain is a row of activities set up between a supplier and a customer with the purpose to provide value to a customer. If the supply chain is smooth it's also profitable and in this article I will show how you can make your supply chain more smooth.

While the parts of the supply chain can be different from case to case, the sequence generally follows the pattern of marketing, ordering, manufacturing, delivery, payment and interaction
While all the activities contribute to the profitability, the most important part is step number one. Marketing is as essential for a business as the blood is for a body. If the marketing doesn't work, no business is generated and if no business is generated you make no money. So you must have the marketing to work properly and one way to do that is through the internet.

When the customers know that you exist and have a product or service to offer, they must be able to send you correct orders in a smooth way. There are many opportunities here but the customers have to know how to order and what information you need.

With a correct order the manufacturing process can start. This part is the most specific one and it is difficult to describe common things that can go wrong. But one way to deal with general problems is to look for bottlenecks and see what you can do to eliminate them.
The same bottleneck approach can be used in the delivery part as well. How about the flight capacity to the destination? Is it tricky to pass the goods through the customs? Would it be profitable to hire someone to deliver to the customers? These are just a few of questions you can ask when attempting to maximise efficiency in this area.

While the manufacturing and delivery parts are similar, the ordering and the payment parts also have some things in common. The customer has to know how to pay and you must inform them how.

As it's much cheaper to keep an existing customer than to get a new one, the interaction part is important to generate future business. It enables you to inform the customers about future offers and provides customers with the opportunity to give you feedback if they are satisfied with your performance or if there is something you could improve.

So here we are with a couple of questions to be answered regarding your business. I wish you good luck with your efforts and look forward to hearing from you to see what we can do together in order to improve your profitability.

Biography

Mikael Nilsson is the founder of Minimpex and has a Masters Degree in Applied Logistics from the Royal Institute of Technology, the number one technological institution in Sweden.
Nilsson has a background from the telecom business where he has knowledge of the entire supply chain from manufacturing via transportation to customer. He has worked in a dozen countries and has experience from a wide range of cultures.