Leveraging Low-Code to Solve Supply Chain Challenges in 2023

Supply chain management is increasingly becoming complex as the global market expands and evolves. Companies from retail, manufacturing, logistics, transportation, and more face new challenges in their supply chain operations, including overloaded warehouses, siloed data, driver shortages, shipping delays, geopolitical uncertainties, and more. Despite rapid technological advancements, many organizations struggle to keep up.

In this article, we will explore common supply chain challenges and how low-code technology can help businesses tackle these challenges.

Supply Chain Challenges in 2023

1. Heavy Reliance on Legacy Applications

   In a highly volatile era of supply and demand, modernizing the supply chain is crucial to stay ahead of your competitors. Legacy applications cannot function with the speed and efficiency required in today’s digitally transformed world. Organizations need to use tracking software and modern applications instead of manual processes.

2. Inability to Respond to Increasing Volumes

   Today, businesses are dealing with escalating inventory costs and overburdening transaction systems, which is not designed to handle increasing volumes. As order volumes increase, businesses require an automated system that prevents operational inefficiency and logs in their inventories for every order placed. It helps them handle ever-increasing order volumes while fulfilling customer expectations.

3. Unforeseen Costs

   The lack of availability of any one material due to uncertainty can lead to unpredictable costs and expensive product deliveries. To avoid supply chain disruptions, businesses can leverage automation and predictive analytics and deliver tailored experiences.

How Low-code helps to Overcome These Supply Chain Challenges

With irregularity and disruptions likely to continue, enterprises must optimize the supply chain at the earliest. And low-code helps accomplish this digital transformation goal of the supply chain by reducing development time, and building agile supply chain systems and applications.

1. Supply Chain Optimization

   Many supply chain tasks, such as invoicing, inventory management, receipt of products and their storage, processing orders, despatching, and distribution, can be fully or partly automated through low-code platforms.

   Supply chains involve multiple systems like applications and databases that can be valuable sources of data for analytics. But due to the complexity of most supply chains, companies are not able to connect data sources efficiently.

   Using low-code platforms, companies can accelerate integrations thanks to application data model consistency and a wide range of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and prepackaged integrations.

2. Centralized Information

   For business owners, manual tracking of information amongst warehouses becomes a cumbersome task and slows down processes. So, developing a system that brings together disparate data sources across warehouses and integrates them into a unified tracking system is crucial. With low-code, enterprises can centralize all their data across warehouses to enable a holistic view of details, including inventory and product availability.

3. Supply Chain Tracking

   Supply chain tracking is important as it helps suppliers and consumers plan more efficiently. Real-time tracking of products from source to consumer helps to make the supply chain process transparent. With the integration capabilities of low-code tools, businesses can improve connections across various systems for easy tracking. It allows maximum supply chain flexibility, IT governance, and integrated cyber security.

4. Increase Collaboration

   Low-code platforms allow for collaboration between teams and stakeholders, improving communication and coordination throughout the supply chain. Stakeholders can access updated information, and they can also make smarter business decisions, supporting better supply chain continuity and avoiding risks.

5. Inventory Management

   Effective inventory management is essential for the smooth operation of any business. It helps you manage your warehouse, track stock levels and stock movements, and provide important information, such as what products are understocked. Manual inventory tracking can be time-consuming and prone to errors.

   Low-code platforms offer more flexible and adaptable solutions, allowing businesses to build an inventory management system that fits their unique processes and workflow.

   By utilizing low-code platforms, organizations can overcome supply chain challenges resulting in improved productivity, cost savings, and better customer experiences.

Why Enterprises must Employ Mendix for Optimizing Supply Chain Management?

The Mendix low-code application development platform lets you optimize supply chain easily, quickly, and affordably. With low-code apps, businesses can go from simply managing their supply chains to building supply chains that are agile and resilient. Some of the benefits of choosing Mendix are:

1. Improves Process Efficiency

   Low-code applications help you automate your processes to keep your supply chain management running smoothly. They help you reduce development time and improve operational visibility and efficiency.

2. Eliminate Data Silos

   Mendix helps eliminate data silos between systems and warehouses to unlock better collaboration. This allows you to focus on essential tasks and new business opportunities.

3. Sharpen Risk Assessment

   Low-code apps increase risk visibility and transparency, so you can prevent the shortage of supplies, improve document process flow, and make timely production planning adjustments.

Simplify Supply-chain Management with Mendix and OmnePresent

Today enterprises need to improve inventory management, automate order fulfillment, and step towards a legacy-free future to stay ahead the curve. Through Mendix application development, organizations can build adaptable applications quickly to improve process efficiency and enable seamless collaboration. OmnePresent’s low-code development services help enterprises modernize their legacy applications for better logistics, and increase overall ROI.