Supply Chain Management Consulting and Strategy

In today’s business climate, customer expectations are increasingly diverse, complex, and volatile. Potential markets and optimum manufacturing locations are continually shifting. With increased interdependencies at every level, supply chain networks have become more vulnerable to costly natural and economic disruptions.

Smart companies respond to these pressures by making their supply chains agile, adaptive, and sustainable. They ensure that their supply chain strategy mirrors their overall business strategy. They know that the most effective supply management responds quickly to even small changes in demand—and relies on smart deployment and planned resilience. And they understand that more efficient, greener supply chains deliver benefits for both business and the environment alike.

What Does Supply Chain Strategy Look Like in Uncertain Times?

Though the current circumstances are unprecedented, BCG is able to successfully apply best practices and lessons from previous crises. Above all, companies must make supply chain decisions that are fast, decisive, and accurate. Companies must then implement those decisions rapidly and transparently.

For example, some companies set up control towers that provide end-to-end visibility into their supply chains and other critical assets. When disruptions emerge—or reemerge—they can act swiftly to stabilize their operations.

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The New Reality for Chief Supply Chain Officers

As CSCOs shift into a second phase of their COVID-19 response, five key actions will help them prepare for recovery.

Our Capabilities in End-to-End Supply Chain Optimization

BCG’s supply chain optimization services span several dimensions.

We Work with Our Clients Across Several Dimensions

We help companies reach peak supply chain performance by improving the metrics critical to success:

Cost, such as operational expenditures
Speed, such as order fulfilment lead time
Delivery, such as forecast accuracy

Our Process

We begin each supply chain engagement by evaluating a company’s site and market. We assess the performance of the current chain and identify essential areas for improvement.

Then we conduct a comprehensive diagnostic analysis that covers everything from a company’s strategy, network, and processes to its organization, systems, and people. We deliver a detailed implementation plan that we can also help execute.

Our Supply Chain Management Offerings

BCG offers a variety of solutions—from innovation centers to hands-on diagnostic tools—that address the specific requirements of your supply chain.

Innovation Center for Operations

Our Innovation Center for Operations (ICOs) is a network of capabilities and offerings that features 11 model factories in China, France, Germany, Ireland, Singapore, and the United States. At each of these locations, our experts conduct workshops, followed by assessments, that enable business leaders to learn about and experiment with every aspect of supply chain management. The curriculum covers everything from supply chain risk management to blockchain supply chain management. The centers feature iLAB, BCG’s proprietary method for demonstrating the tangible value of supply chain optimization.

Supply Chain Academy

Through our unique supply chain enablement offering, the Supply Chain Academy, we cultivate critical skills and deliver conceptual insights and real-life applications. And we deliver on-the-job training to your key employees at your own sites.

Learning opportunities and instructional programs are essential to building world-class capabilities in supply chain management. Our Supply Chain Academy lets you and your employees delve into blockchain supply chain use cases, for example, and gives you access to our experts in supply chain management. As with our model factories, the academy’s coursework combines classroom interactions with real-world scenarios and case studies.

Supply Chain Operations Diagnostic and Performance Benchmarking

We begin each supply chain consultation by developing cost and performance baselines for your supply chain from end to end. This diagnostic includes a maturity assessment, a quantitative breakdown, and transformation roadmaps. Our supply chain optimization diagnostic optimizes your end-to-end supply chain and is enabled by our online digital tool.

We conduct a detailed supply chain maturity and qualitative assessment to identify capability gaps and provide maturity scoring across 20 supply chain levers. The diagnostic also delivers rapid quantitative analysis of targeted supply chain performance opportunities.

Digital Supply Chain Solutions

BCG helps our clients capture real-time, end-to-end visibility over their supply chain with a bionic supply chain strategy. We enable truly digital supply chains in many ways: applying AI to supply chain forecasting and scenario planning, developing and deploying supply chain control towers for quick diagnoses and response, and modeling a company’s entire supply chain with a digital twin in order to pinpoint where volatility, uncertainty, and risk exist—and optimization is possible.

See more of our experts in Supply Chain Management

Featured Supply Chain Management Work with Clients

Halving Lead Time

BCG redesigned the supply chain for a specialty chemicals manufacturer, reducing the lead time for orders from eight weeks to four—and for inventory by 30%.

Aligning Segments with Needs

We assessed the supply chain strategy for a commodity chemicals manufacturer, then aligned its segmentation with market needs. As a result, the company achieved a 2% lift in revenue and a 15% drop in inventory.

BCG’s Latest Insights on Supply Chain Management

Your Supply Chain Needs a Sustainability Strategy

Companies seeking to reduce their environmental footprint should focus on one element of their operations in particular: their global supply chains.

Redrawing the Map of Global Trade

Even when the global economy fully recovers, the international trade landscape will look dramatically different in the years ahead than it did before the pandemic.