How to become a world-class player in the field of the supply chain?

Peter Börjesson is the Vice President of Operations – Sourcing at Alfa Laval Group. Listen to his views on how to become a world-class player in the field of procurement, sourcing, and supply chain.

”The traditional role of procurement and sourcing organization has changed in the last few years. It’s much more about creating networks, setting up the requisites for your business. In order to be that supply chain partner for your company, you need to make sure you understand the business. What is the aim your business wants to do? What customers we are trying to serve? What are the critical patterns of your sales and customer offer? Before you understand that, you can’t really go and design your value chain or supply chains.

“It’s completely new knowledge and experience that people in the supply chain need to have. Connecting to the business much more and being a window to the whole supply chain, in terms of both the experience and knowledge, technology innovation, and making sure we can optimize and reduce waste. Those are the elements of a good and world-class supply chain organization.”

“When thinking about what technologies should be adopted, it’s really important to understand where are we right now: What will serve our customers best? What operational waste should be reduced? What is our technological maturity? The basis should be fixed first,” reminds Peter Börjesson.

“Make sure you have a robust supply chain, you can manage your suppliers in a good way, communicate with them in a good way and you relay the requirements in a good way. What you need to achieve, is that customer sees that, yes we are getting either better service or more value for money. And from a supply chain point of view, it is taking out waste, taking out steps, and improving the experience of your customers.”

“My advice for manufacturing companies is simple: Go back to your basis. Understand your value chains. Do your internal mapping and know where you are. Understand your pain points. And then you can derive what your next steps and focus areas should be.”

“We at the sourcing started by doing a pain point analysis to understand where we have gaps and inefficiencies, where we have a lot of manual work going on – which typically are the areas you can improve the most. We are learning what new technologies can give us for those areas and taking onboard those technologies which can improve those pain point areas,” concludes Peter Börjesson.