When it comes to running an ecommerce supply chain, it’s not enough to get goods from one place to another; you must also get them there intact and in the right way.
This makes supply chain quality a key component that sets your business apart from the competition. If you can’t transfer goods from suppliers to distributors to end customers efficiently, or preserve the quality of materials and finished products at every step, you risk making costly mistakes and disappointing customers. But if your supply chain quality is good, your brand is positioned to maximise ROI and win business.
In this guide, we’ll walk through the importance of optimising your supply chain quality and the challenges that you may face along the way. We also break down some practical strategies to improve quality in your supply chain and increase your bottom line.
What is supply chain quality?
Supply chain quality is an aspect of supply chain management that focuses on whether materials, goods, and processes throughout your supply chain consistently meet the necessary standards.
It extends throughout the entire supply chain, beginning with the sourcing of quality raw materials and ending with safely delivering the right products to the end customer. As such, supply chain quality relies heavily on good supply chain coordination between key players like suppliers, manufacturers, and logistics providers.
Why supply chain quality is crucial to monitor
Your supply chain optimisation efforts should focus on improving quality, as quality will have a ripple effect on other aspects of your business – including your operations, bottom line, and reputation. Here are some of the main reasons why you need to keep a close eye on supply chain quality.
Enhanced customer satisfaction
Monitoring your supply chain quality is crucial for meeting customer expectations. When you deliver high-quality products accurately and on time, you improve the overall delivery experience and bolster customer satisfaction.
Reduced costs
Efficient quality management helps you reduce defects and damage. This means that you also minimise waste and returns, preventing the need for consistent rework and saving you time and money by reducing unnecessary expenses.
Increased operational efficiency
Supply chain quality isn’t just about your goods – your operations and processes should be high-quality as well. Optimising your procedures helps you build high-quality and efficient operations, so you can find ways to do things more efficiently with minimal downtime while reducing inefficiencies throughout the supply chain.
Improved brand reputation
By maintaining quality standards and meeting customer expectations consistently, you build an image of credibility. This strengthens trust and improves your brand reputation.
Better risk mitigation
Supply chain quality is also about complying with industry regulations. When you strictly adhere to these standards, you mitigate a number of risks related to safety while also preventing legal repercussions.
Key challenges when maintaining supply chain quality
Maintaining high supply chain quality offers huge benefits to your business – but the process isn’t without challenges. Be prepared to face the following obstacles when ensuring quality in your supply chain operations.
Global supply chain complexities
Managing global supply chains can be extremely complicated. Businesses may face:
- Difficulties maintaining quality as they navigate cross-border regulations.
- Risks like theft, damage, and high fees when transporting goods long distances
- Challenges upholding standards when you work with overseas partners
- Added complexities resulting from changing trade policies and geopolitical tensions
All of these factors could affect quality at various stages of the supply chain.
Balancing cost and quality
Quality comes at a price, which often means sourcing higher-quality products will cost you more. This can make it challenging to strategically balance cost and quality as you may have to spend more to maintain your quality standards.
As a result, businesses will need to find ways to reduce operational costs in other areas to offset these higher prices, such as adopting lean logistics to eliminate unnecessary processes.
Inconsistent fulfilment standards across locations
Maintaining quality standards can be a challenge for businesses with multi-location fulfilment. With different warehouses having varying standards, you may experience delays and errors that lead to customer dissatisfaction. This is exactly why expert supply chain enablement providers like ShipBob standardize processes across its entire fulfilment network to maintain uniformity and meet quality standards consistently.
Limited visibility into inventory and operations
A lot of quality issues in the supply chain stem from a lack of real-time visibility into your operations. With limited supply chain visibility, you may:
- Not see how much inventory you need, leading to delayed replenishments and stockouts
- End up ordering more inventory than you really need, leading to overstock issues
- Create inefficiencies, as you may experience backlogs and delays within various processes
A reliable warehouse management system helps address these key challenges. With real-time access to your warehouse and inventory data, a WMS gives you the visibility you need to make informed and timely decisions and improve efficiency.
High order fulfilment error rates
Businesses that struggle with high mis-picks and mis-shipments may find it difficult to maintain supply chain quality. Receiving the wrong products or the incorrect quantity of items could negatively impact customer satisfaction. Moreover, it creates a need to do double the work to deliver the right orders to customers. These can significantly add to your operational costs.
Having automated workflows results in a smoother fulfilment process. Meanwhile, tools like barcode scanners let you run multiple checks and balances throughout the supply chain workflow, minimising human errors and inventory discrepancies. This will ultimately lead to better fulfilment accuracy.
5 strategies to improve supply chain quality
Once you figure out the challenges you might face, you can start putting together a strategy to address them so you can effectively improve quality. Here are a few actionable steps to improve your supply chain quality.
1. Adopt distributed inventory models
The quality of your supply chain processes is reflected in things like inventory availability and timely deliveries. A distributed inventory model is key to achieving this, as you strategically store your inventory across multiple fulfilment centres. That way, you place inventory closer to your customers and ship it out from the most convenient locations to reduce transit times.
ShipBob, for example, leverages an expansive fulfilment network across 60+ locations. This allows brands to ship out orders from the nearest fulfilment centre and deliver them on time.
Shorter transit times not only result in timely deliveries but also enable you to reduce shipping costs, so you don’t necessarily have to pay premium to get faster delivery, allowing you to balance quality and cost.
2. Standardize fulfilment processes across locations
Even with a distributed inventory model, it’s still important to maintain consistency in your processes across all locations. Following variable processes at different locations leaves you vulnerable to errors, delays, and inefficiencies.
Have a consistent standard operating procedure (SOP) for receiving, picking, packing, and shipping, and make sure to follow it across all your fulfilment centres.
At ShipBob, for instance, maintaining uniform standards across a global fulfilment network ensures higher efficiency and fewer errors. Even with a hybrid fulfilment strategy, you should ensure that the same standards are maintained for both in-house and outsourced fulfilment.
3. Enhance communication across the supply chain
As mentioned earlier, supply chain quality depends on good coordination between key players. Clear and transparent communication plays a vital role in coordinating tasks between suppliers, warehouses, and retailers, and is essential for maintaining good supplier-manufacturer relationships.
When supply chain partners proactively share updates and essential information, it allows teams to take necessary action to maintain the supply chain workflow. For instance, if there’s a shortage of raw materials affecting production, manufacturers should notify suppliers so they can look for backup. Similarly, brands should keep customers updated on delivery timelines to improve their experience.
4. Use real-time analytics and insights
Closely monitoring your supply chain performance is one of the key steps to improving quality. Looking into metrics related to your inventory and order performance can give you a better understanding of demand trends and inventory needs. This allows you to stock up accordingly so you can prevent stockouts and excess inventory.
Other supply chain metrics related to your fulfilment performance can also show you what needs improving. You can use your analytics to see where you’re experiencing delays or whether you’re spending too much, so you can optimise accordingly.
5. Partner with an expert for fulfilment
With so many boxes to tick and moving parts to manage, maintaining quality in the supply chain is easier said than done. If you’re feeling overwhelmed or lack the resources to meet your quality standards consistently, it makes the most sense to leave it to the experts.
Working with an experienced fulfilment partner like ShipBob helps you ensure consistent quality in all aspects of fulfilment. By leveraging an expansive fulfilment network, where uniform standards are applied for consistency, you can significantly improve efficiency and accuracy. This is essential for improving fulfilment quality while enhancing the customer experience.
How ShipBob delivers consistent supply chain quality
Supply chain quality is the key factor differentiating a successful ecommerce business from the rest. By improving quality, you enjoy greater efficiency and cost savings while enhancing customer satisfaction and boosting brand reputation.
ShipBob’s world-leading fulfilment solutions empower businesses to effectively maintain quality standards within the end-to-end supply chain. Here’s how:
A global network with standardized processes
Long transit times, risk of product damage, and high shipping costs are some common challenges that affect supply chain quality. For businesses that serve an international consumer base, complex cross-border regulations further add to the challenge.
ShipBob addresses these issues with a global fulfilment network across 60+ locations. This allows you to distribute your inventory between multiple fulfilment centres and store it closer to your international customers, so you can:
- Significantly reduce the cost of international shipping
- Minimise international shipping times (and mitigate the risk of damage in transit)
- Drastically reduce the complexities that come with cross-border shipments
All of the fulfilment centres in ShipBob’s network run on ShipBob’s WMS, which standardizes operations, tracking, and data across every site. This ensures high-quality standards and allowing you to maintain consistency, even across borders, so you can meet your quality goals.
Brands like Spikeball have been able to improve delivery speeds and cost-efficiency for their international orders by leveraging ShipBob’s fulfilment centres in Canada and Europe.
“Canada is our biggest market outside of the US. We were shipping from our Chicago area warehouse to Canada for a long time. We were missing out on revenue by taking on import fees and taxes. We wanted to outsource fulfilment there to reclaim some of that. We also wanted to help improve customer satisfaction by speeding up their order delivery time and avoiding those frustrating customs hold-ups. Being in ShipBob’s Canadian fulfilment centre has been great for us.”
Adam LaGesse, Global Warehousing Director at Spikeball
Meanwhile, Beachwaver leverages ShipBob’s fulfilment centres in five countries – and as a result, they’re no longer limited by what they can ship from their own warehouse in Illinois. Instead, their sales and marketing teams have been able to reach a greater market internationally while keeping their shipping costs low.
“In the past two years, we have been able to stop questioning our fulfilment limit. Our previous international shipping solutions were far too time-consuming and expensive to process overseas orders from our warehouse. We’ve been able to leverage ShipBob fulfilment centres in 5 countries. That has allowed our sales and marketing teams to reach for greater market internationally, as well as across the US. ShipBob has helped us grow our international market.”
Tom Wall, Vice President of Global Warehousing & Logistics at Beachwaver Co.
Inventory Placement Program for speed and cost efficiency
Inventory availability and delivery speed are key factors defining the quality of your supply chain. Stockouts and backorders reflect poorly on your business, and discourage customers from shopping with or purchasing from your brand again, while shipment delays ca give your brands a reputation for being slow and unreliable.
ShipBob’s Inventory Placement Program helps you avoid these pitfalls by strategically distributing your inventory across its network. The program relies on a proprietary algorithm that uses inventory performance data and region-specific demand patterns to determine optimal inventory distribution. That way, you get to store more inventory in high-demand regions to maintain product availability.
Moreover, by distributing your inventory across different locations, you can ship out orders based on proximity. That way, packages travel shorter distances, which lowers costs while allowing faster shipping.
After leveraging this program, brands like Semaine Health have reduced their transit times by a third. Now they are delivering orders in just 3.6 days when deliveries previously took an average of 5.2 days. On top of this, the program has helped them reduce fulfilment costs by $2 per order compared to their previous 3PL.
Customizable fulfilment for unique brand needs
Although many brands want to deliver customised brand experiences, it’s often difficult to balance these with quality. Brands may sacrifice customisation in an effort to maintain uniform standards across their supply chain operations.
However, ShipBob proves that quality doesn’t have to come at the cost of custom experiences. With a powerful customisation suite, you get to deliver unforgettable branded experiences while consistently meeting quality standards.
Whether you want to deliver orders in branded packaging, build kits consisting of multiple items, add memorable gift notes, or include special marketing inserts, ShipBob’s logic allows you to set up rules for what custom elements to include in which orders, allowing you to automate the customisation process to save time without sacrificing those extra touches.
“We really focus on the unboxing and post-purchase experience, so ShipBob’s robust customisation capabilities make it so easy for us to add special touches like marketing inserts to an order. We were just recently running a bunch of different inserts and were able to handle the majority of that on our end via ShipBob’s tagging rules. All I have to do is go into ShipBob’s Rules Engine, and create a rule that says, “If an order has this tag, add an insert.” I’ve never seen that before where our fulfilment partner can operate similar to how we run marketing email campaigns with tags and rules.
We also use ShipBob’s Rule Engine to implement custom packaging elements, like custom dividers and bubble wrap. I’ll create a rule on my end where every time a certain candle comes on an order, ShipBob knows to put the ordered items in a specific bag. It’s all quick and easy, and we can aways change rules on the fly as our business changes.”
Rachel Tannenholz, President, and Melissa Mosheim, Director of Logistics at Aroma360
Get started with ShipBob today
Start your journey to improving supply chain quality with ShipBob as your expert supply chain enablement and fulfilment partner. Ensure efficiency and speed with powerful proprietary technology and fulfilment solutions, including an expansive fulfilment network, standardized service, and operational accuracy.
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