Once of the biggest challenges of running a small or medium enterprise is managing the elements which our out of your control.
It means that every late delivery, price hike or missing component has to be dealt with immediately, and the responsibility lies directly one your desk.
SMEs don’t always have the resource to put a contingency plan in place for every eventuality, and research by Ivalua shows that up to 47% of UK businesses have reported an increase in supply chain disruption over the past year.
If you’re an SME, you don’t have the buffer stock or spare cash flow that bigger competitors do. But few practical shifts in how you manage sourcing, stock and delivery can be the difference between growth and stagnation.
1. Cultivate relationships.
Sustaining strong relationships with both your customers and your suppliers can help your business weather times of unpredictability.
A supplier who warns you six weeks ahead that a raw material is getting scarce is worth more than one who ships on time until, one day, they don’t. Regular, sustained contact and a friendly relationship will help to put you at the top of their priority list, helping you to plan ahead.
The same logic can apply at the other end of the chain too – customers forgive delays they’re told about in advance far more readily than delays they discover at checkout, or worse, after expected delivery has already been delayed. Managing expectations is a crucial part of customer service.
2. Get closer to home.
Sourcing from overseas can look cheaper on paper, but the lead time gap changes what you’re able to promise a customer. A shopfitter or kitchen producer sourcing sheet materials from a UK supplier can quote a firm delivery date with confidence, but one waiting on a container from the other side of the world is gambling on port schedules and exchange rates in equal measure.
This is where the right distribution partner does more than just deliver boxes. Leeds-based Lawcris supplies decorative panels and sheet materials nationwide with next-day delivery, and also offers in-house precision cutting and CNC machining, meaning smaller manufacturers and shopfitters can shorten their own production runs without investing in that equipment themselves.
A trusted supplier who can deliver to spec is a way of borrowing capability rather than buying it outright.
3. Diversify – but don’t overcomplicate.
Relying on one supplier for a critical component is efficient until that supplier has a bad month, a cash flow problem, or a factory fire.
You don’t need five backup suppliers for every part of your business. Just one alternative for anything genuinely critical is often enough to stop a single point of failure turning into a full stop.
Free tools like the UK Supply Chain Directory let businesses search by sector and location to identify new manufacturing partners, making it far easier to line up a backup before you actually need one.
There are ways to safeguard your supply chain without the budget of big business behind you. Simply pay attention to the parts of the business that are prone to go unnoticed until they break, and build in just enough flexibility to ensure that one disruption can’t result in a full-scale crisis.
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