Tag Archives: Category intelligence

Introduction

New digital tools and platforms continue to rewrite the industry regulations as consumer behavior changes. New sources of innovation and competitive advantage are necessary. Reassessing your supply chain is necessary in order to do that. You may prepare your supply chain strategy for telecom and media for today’s and tomorrow’s issues with the aid of supply chain management in the telecommunications industry. Supply chain management offers complete support for the supply chains you employ to provide tangible goods like telephones.

The telecom industry’s severe disruption of the labor and equipment supply chains makes it more challenging to service the growing demand. Lengthened lead times to consumers brought on by problems in the supply chain in once heavily relied-upon manufacturing locations (like China) have a detrimental effect on serviceability and, consequently, revenue.

Efficiency and effectiveness can be used to gauge the functioning of a supply chain. The first is a cost containment indicator, which includes things like warehousing costs, costs associated with inbound and outbound activities, and rising asset turnover. The second reliability indication is order fulfillment, safety stock turnover, and inventory turns. The performance of the supply chain strategy for telecom and media is crucial for a firm to compete in the global market.

The Telecom & Media Industry’s Biggest Challenges

Following are the challenges of telecom and media industries:

Telecom & Media Industry's Biggest Challenges

Telecom & Media Industry’s Biggest Challenges

Data and Communications Silos.

Data often resides in silos for telecoms firms. Cross-team collaboration is time-consuming due to data being spread across systems for transportation management, customer support, and procurement internally. Externally, telecom businesses frequently correspond manually with suppliers and subcontractors. These data silos cause teams to spend more time manually communicating internally and externally and searching for information across numerous platforms, which slows down the supply chain process. Improving internal data exchange and automating external connections are necessary for greater efficiency.

Improving physical product production and supply chain distribution.

Cell phones and tablets are examples of physical goods that need the standard retail supply chain, which entails planning, sourcing materials, production, delivery, and distribution to both stores and end users’ homes. There are numerous opportunities for improvement throughout the entire process. The production of the physical products and the supply chain for the distribution can be assessed to improve and enhance the sector.

Tracking and managing outages effectively.

You must increase service uptime if you want to keep clients pleased. This entails identifying outages as soon as they occur, tracking out the causes, and sending out maintenance teams or professionals to restore networks to service.

You may improve customer service by designing effective processes and automating as much of the procedure as you can. For instance, the relevant application may open a case in case management, schedule, and dispatch the closest technicians to the area to investigate if there is an outage in a certain place. Bonus points if there is a mobile application that enables technicians to snap images, track the progress of their job, and access knowledge base articles to resolve problems more rapidly.

Numerous resources are needed for network upgrades.

Telecom companies have made large investments in the creation of 5G networks. This massive undertaking requires a great deal of organization, planning, and labor in addition to a wide range of materials, including wires, chips, and physical building materials for new towers. Additionally, as a result of COVID-19, more employees set up home offices, necessitating network upgrades in residential areas that took more time and money to complete. Telecommunications firms’ supply chains must be strong and efficient in order for them to see a return on their investments.

Magistral’s Solutions on Supply chain for telecom and media

Magistral Consulting offers a range of value-added services for the Supply chain strategy for telecom and media industry. Magistral Consulting provides a number of services related to supply chain for the media and telecommunications sector, including:

Key Aspects of Supply Chain in Telecom Industry

Key Aspects of Supply Chain in Telecom Industry

Category Intelligence

Demand and Supply Market Analysis:

When making daily decisions, both people and small businesses can more accurately assess market circumstances by analyzing economic principles like supply and demand. The demand curve depicts how much of a commodity or service a consumer will demand at various price points. The market demand curve is the total of all demand curves for a particular commodity or service. Examples of demand and supply analyses cover a number of essential ideas. The quantity of an item or service that will be sold at different price points over a certain length of time is represented by the supply curve in comparison. When examining the supply curve, the relationship between price and quantity delivered is straightforward. The telecom sector is changing quickly as a result of technological advancements and lightning-fast innovation. Additionally, it is a sector whose rules are always changing, offering Communications Service Providers (CSPs) enormous chances for expansion. This future of telecom is being shaped by five primary forces: Value-added Managed Services, 5G, NFV/SDN, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning, Ecosystem Growing Controlled Services. The vulnerabilities and strengths of an industry can be determined using Porter’s Five Forces, a model that identifies and examines five competitive forces that affect every industry. In order to develop company strategy, the structure of an industry is typically identified using the Five Forces analysis.

Pricing Movements and Forecasts:

Finding out what customers are willing to pay for a good or service is the goal of the research technique known as pricing research. Pricing research seeks to establish the best price for new products as well as gauge how price changes affect demand for any offer. When a buyer needs more expensive or complex solutions, they will issue a Request for Proposal (RFP) to potential suppliers. The intent is to solicit business proposals from various suppliers in order to ensure competition, learn more about each supplier’s capabilities and solutions, and gather important market intelligence.

Major Players and Profiles:

A profile will provide you with the fundamental details you require about the company and its operations, including a business overview and essential facts, details on the structure and strategy, information on the leading rivals, significant goods and services, prospects, etc. You can use a SWOT analysis to highlight the company’s advantages, disadvantages, opportunities, and threats as a starting point for future research on the business and/or its rivals.

Negotiation Strategy:

Without considering the precise cost and profit calculations the vendor used to determine the price, pricing analysis is the process of determining if the asking price for a good or service is fair and acceptable. The term “competitive intelligence” refers to the capacity to compile, examine, and apply data on clients, consumers, and other market elements that support a company’s competitive edge.

Custom Intelligence:

Indirect sourcing deals with the provision of sporadic commodities, while direct sourcing concentrates on securing the key supplies that are processed and supplied to your clients.

Impact Assessments:

Assessment for the client over Geo-political events and natural disasters to understand and forecast the impact on the category.

Category Dashboards:

Supply chain dashboards provide supply chain experts with a greater understanding of every component of their supply chain, enabling them to recognize potential problems early and take appropriate action. They also offer tools for monitoring the advancement of different supply chain projects in comparison to predetermined KPIs.

Operations Support:

Outsourcing of processes:

Outsourcing which includes planning, control and reporting processes outsourcing for the client.

Scheduling Production:

In depth effective scheduling of men, material and machine around production as per requirement and goals.

Reports on Production:

Generation of reports on production on basis of shift-wise, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual reports.

About Magistral Consulting

Magistral Consulting has helped multiple companies to reduce operations costs through its offerings in Procurement and Supply Chain.

For setting up an appointment with a Magistral representative visit www.magistralconsulting.com/contact

About the Author

The article is Authored by the Marketing Department of Magistral Consulting. For any business inquiries, you could reach out to  prabhash.choudhary@magistralconsulting.com

The Importance of Procurement

In any organization, the procurement department plays a vital role in the successful development of a product. The procurement department, whether related to the fast-moving consumer goods industry or retail, generally refers to the procurement of raw materials. However, the procurement department can be associated either with business continuity activities such as inventory purchasing or for business support like that done for the Information technology department. It is therefore evident that this resource needs effective management. This is where category management comes into play.

According to a study, companies that have successful category management programs have a mean lead supplier time of only 6 days vis a vis the normal time of 14 days.

Some key points associated with the global markets that are to be noted here are:

-Transportation and logistics activities account for 10-12% of global GDP.

-The United States is ranked tenth in terms of trade logistics performance.

-According to 50% of respondents, the transformative capabilities of technologies such as advanced software and AI have a significant impact on their performance.

-It is expected that by 2024, more than 60% of G2000 manufacturing organizations will use advanced technologies such as AI to cut costs by up to 20%.

What are Category Management and Category Intelligence?

Category management is a strategic approach to acquiring raw materials for manufacturing. While sourcing is all about making the right purchasing decisions, category intelligence assists an organization in making the right purchasing “yes” or “no” decisions. This not only aids in resource optimization but also cost reduction.

The term “category intelligence” is not new, but it is surprising that even after the introduction of best practices for category intelligence, category managers have failed to maintain effective category intelligence documents.

The image below illustrates four broad areas that an effective category intelligence system affects.

Category Intelligence in Supply Chain Management

Category Intelligence in Supply Chain Management

The Role of a Category Intelligence Manager

This is a specialized role in which a category manager is responsible for a specific function or category of goods or services, such as the purchasing department or stock maintenance units. The role could include a variety of responsibilities ranging from procurement to strategic sourcing, as well as developing a sourcing plan and reporting.

In general, these functions are becoming more specialized, with category managers increasingly requiring specialized degrees in their respective domains.

Process of Category Intelligence

Identifying opportunities, translating trends, understanding the factors, providing guidance, and understanding stakeholder needs are all steps in the category intelligence process. These are explained in greater detail below:

Process of Category Intelligence

Process of Category Intelligence

-Identifying Opportunities: This step helps to cut down the cost, reduce the risk of competitors and increase the efficiency of the organization.

-Translate major trends and industry events: The second most important step is to translate these events into an actionable strategy that can be broadly put into categories.

-Understand the underlying drivers: All the underlying factors must be understood completely to understand what will be their business impact.

-Timely Guidance: Time-to-time guidance is provided to reduce the risk in the long-term sustainability of the business.

-Understand evolving business needs and stakeholder demands: This is done to ensure that the strategies and approaches are fitting well.

How category intelligence helps

Intelligent procurement or having an effective category intelligence system can help an organization in several ways. Also known as intelligent procurement, it simply means managing all aspects of vendor spending in one central digital place so that one can have a holistic view of their spending.

-Access to market intelligence:

Sourcing managers will have to keep track of multiple sources of information in order to be on top of things. For example, procurement of food grains requires one to not only be up to date with the prices but also the prices in different markets, the supply and demand dynamics, and the cost implications of various decisions.

-In supplier selection:

Finding the right supplier for an organization can be a challenging task as it requires risk evaluation as well as things such as how reliable a supplier is. This can consume a considerable time as the search for the right supplier entail testing their services as well as making a decision on the long-term reliability of the supplier for an organization.

-Curbing excess spending:

A quick response to changing market dynamics is one of the core tests to check the effectiveness of an efficient procurement department. An effective category intelligence system helps curb any excessive spending by the procurement department by providing correct information and helping in making effective predictions and decisions.

According to a study random, unplanned buying can account for 30-45% of all indirect purchases while in the case of smaller organizations it can account for almost 80-90% of the indirect purchase.

Category intelligence reports empower the procurement department to better negotiate the pricing and terms of agreement with its suppliers.

-Assessing supplier performance:

Getting past data or historical information about the suppliers and establishing benchmarks to assess the performance of suppliers is a difficult challenge for any organization.

A good category intelligence system envisages correcting this situation by not only providing access to data but also benchmarking and forecasting. A good category intelligence report aids in listing KPIs and benchmarking data thereby assisting in effective supplier management.

-Tracking multiple sources of data:

Effective category intelligence helps in tracking multiple sources of data from several marketplaces thereby ensuring ease in information handling. Having an on-demand intelligence system helps with access to previously unknown sources of information such as market size, market potential, and supplier coverage for businesses seeking to grow. Such an intelligence system helps a company in taking care of decisions at a local as well as a global level.

-Time-saving:

Category intelligence systems not only help in cost savings for a firm but also saves considerable man hours required for gathering and processing data.

Magistral’s Services on Category Intelligence:

Our Category Intelligence services help clients stay on top of indirect categories like Marketing Services, Professional Services, Travel and Lodging, MRO, Information Technology, HR, Transportation, and Utilities, among others. Our insights help corporations build the right category strategy with significant cost benefits.

Our major service offerings are:

-Demand and Market Supply Analysis:

In this analysis, we make category landscape reports, create the demand drivers, identify major players and analyze through Porter’s 5 Force model of analysis.

-Pricing Movements and Forecast:

In Pricing movements, we study the various pricing strategies and perform primary research to obtain quotations and RFPs.

-Major Players and Profiles:

Major company profiles are identified and SWOT analysis is done on them to manage the risk of the companies.

-Negotiation Strategy:

In this analysis of pricing is done and also competitive analysis is taken care of.

-Newsletters:

In this service, newsletters are made, also the developments across the categories are tracked proactively.

-Custom Intelligence:

Here, we provide custom direct and indirect sourcing.

-Impact Assessments:

In this, all the events are assessed like Geo-political events, Natural disasters.

-Category Dashboards:

It is created to have a comprehensive view of category and impacting factors.

About Magistral Consulting

Magistral Consulting has helped multiple companies to reduce operations costs through its offerings in Procurement and Supply Chain.

About the Author

The article is Authored by Marketing Department of Magistral Consulting. For any business inquiries, you could reach out to prabhash.choudhary@magistralconsulting.com