Design principles - Supply Chain Lens

Design principles

Supply chain operations rely on a complex technology landscape for the following key reasons:

  • Geographical extension and coverage across the globe.

  • Facilities geographically distributed requiring a mix of applications to run their operations.

  • The number of products and services.

  • Applications variety.

  • Number of participants involved - internal and external - with their own systems to integrate with.

As companies are going through the process of optimizing their operations for sustainability, they recognize that the environmental impact is challenging but they also know that every apparently small detail and progress makes a significant change in reaching the sustainability targets. Companies need to adhere to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards to minimize environmental impact.

  • Structure for visibility over the supply chain network: Structure your business and IT operations to collect the required visibility information over the entire supply chain network, comprising operations delivered through your own supply chain infrastructure and operations delivered by your partners, providers and carriers.

  • Monitor operations' performance across the organization with the supply chain SCOR model: Monitor and measure supply chains business and IT operations performance through the supply chain operations reference (SCOR) model, providing a standard framework and a standard set of KPIs to build a common view, recognizable internally and externally, of your sustainability performance versus business and sustainability targets over plan, source, make, deliver, return, and enable model's areas.

  • Look at supply chain through the systems perspective: Apply the systems perspective to your supply chains to look at your whole operations as an interconnected system, encompassing all stages, processes, and flows of materials, information, and resources. Applying this lens and perspective, it helps organizations to emphasize relationships, feedback loops among the different processes, stages, and parties. It also allows to identify, track and limit ripple effects, where changes or disruptions in one area can have effects able to spread and impact throughout the entire system.

  • Automate the data collection of sustainability-related information: Automate ESG data collection like carbon emissions and greenhouse gas metrics by building integrations with partners like freight forwarders and transportation companies, where applicable:

    • All the time-consuming tasks to reduce the usage time of a required AWS resource, to collect data for peaks and valleys analysis to enable automatic scalability based on demand,

    • The provisioning of the AWS services you need to support your operations, to let them follow your business needs.

  • Design for on-demand over always-on, where possible: To enhance your supply chain workloads on AWS, focus on improving your predictive capabilities for resource requirements. Use forecasts, seasonality patterns, and analyses of peaks and valleys to favor on-demand resources over always-on instances. This approach allows for more efficient resource management, whether you are turning resources on and off, scaling up and down, or scaling horizontally.

  • Align supply chain-related sustainability to company-wise sustainability goals: Align supply chain workloads and the technology-related emissions to the wider organization's sustainability strategy and goals to enable the supply chain design, plan and execute for sustainability.