How GRA Supply Chain Consultants add value. What is Supply Chain Management consulting?

Carter McNabb explains GRA Supply Chain Consultants value proposition
00:12 - GRA’s value proposition and delivering to clients
00:20 - How does GRA deliver on its value proposition of turning its customers' supply chains into a competitive advantage?
01:24 - Areas of Supply Chain Strategy, Supply Chain Planning and Supply Chain Execution that GRA works in
03:55 - Ways in which GRA engages with clients on supply chain, procurement and logistics projects
06:06 - Industries and types of clients that GRA has worked with - Apparel, Asset Intensive & MRO, Automotive/Aerospace, Construction & Building, Food & Beverage, Government, Health & Pharmaceuticals, Manufacturing & Distribution, Mining and Resources, Services & Technology, Service Supply Chain.
What is Supply Chain Management? What is scenario planning?
Selected (edited) transcription
Dan Knox: Carter, can you tell me a little bit more about some of the areas that GRA work in?
Carter McNabb: At a high level, I'd say that we work in supply chain and procurement, strategy, planning, and execution.
Strategy is really around network design and planning. So what sort of supply chain do we want to have globally and/or locally? What are the factors that influence that? How do we make sure that's resilient, it's optimised, and actually provides for some resilience in the future as well. We also do a lot of work in insourcing, outsourcing decisions. So what do we need to have internally? What can be outsourced, as appropriate. We also do work in procurement strategy and strategic sourcing.
The second area that we work in is what we call planning. So once we have a clear picture of what the supply chain needs to look like, we then have to plan the activity on it, and that really lives in areas like S&OP, integrated business planning (IBO), scenario planning, demand planning, inventory optimisation, replenishment planning, and from a procurement perspective, also the category planning. What we're doing here is we're trying to optimise the decisions we're making about what needs to go where and when. So again, to minimise the amount of inventory, maximise the service level, and also make sure that there's cost efficiencies.
The third area that we work in, in terms of those levels, is the execution area. Once we've planned our network and we know what it looks like, we've got the activity profile. What are the things that we're going to do to make sure that happens? And so that's really around warehousing. So it can be warehouse design, construct. It could be all of the warehouses practises and process and technologies. So what's right to deliver that outcome and to make sure we can service the business efficiently and we have the right capacity. We also look at that in terms of transportation management and planning, and some of that can tie back into the insourcing, outsourcing question.
And there's also that piece on contract execution and contract management to make sure that everything that we're doing is aligned with the premise and the performance guarantee that we had in our procurement arrangements.
If I then look at the ways in which we engage, those are sort of the levels or the categories, the ways we engage is we can work on a professional services basis. Professional services means that we might have somebody working as a member of your team, if that's something that you want in the business as part of the team on a full-time or otherwise basis to build the capability internally and create something that can be owned and handed over to the business over time.
We also have a benchmarking capability, and our benchmarking's a bit different because it's not just benchmarking of the financial and service outcomes.
We've also got a training and education business called Supply Chain Business Institute, and we do individual tailored courses for organisations, mentoring programmes for people in the business that you want to build capabilities within, and we also do public, best practise short courses in a variety of topics.
The last sort of category is systems. We believe technology is quite essential on supply chain, so we use technology to support a lot of our analysis work, and also to implement within businesses to increase capability. GAINS, which is a best practise demand inventory optimisation replenishment planning system & also has neural network and artificial intelligence capabilities, which is very powerful, and it's kind of a new leading-edge capability we're seeing in the market. We also work with JDA, which is a broader suite that has forecasting and planning, but a lot in the network strategy and design. We've done some work with Llamasoft, which is also network design and strategy. We've got a relationship with Zycus, which is a large-scale procurement platform. We've also worked with all of the major ERP systems in quite a deep way, and a lot of the other best in class or best practise systems.

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