Cover Story — Supply Chain Solutions, Inc.

When most companies think about what gives them a competitive edge, they typically discuss superior product design, engineering or top-notch customer service.  What many of them don’t categorize as a differentiation point is how they manage their supply chain.

At least not yet.

Supply Chain Solutions, Inc. is out to change all of that.

Headquartered in Grand Rapids, Supply Chain Solutions (SCS) assists companies with everything from lowering delivery costs to making sweeping changes in their supply chain structure that will translate to a company’s bottom line.

To the experts at SCS, improving a supply chain is one of the most strategic things any company can do in today’s competitive environment. SCS works with everybody who touches the process of getting a product to a customer – from raw material or component suppliers, internal and external inventory managers, production and assembly workers, distributors, and end customers.   

“Oftentimes, our findings are surprising,” said CEO Les Brand.  “We’ve had cases where a manager was told to source offshore to save costs, only to find out through a full analysis that they could actually keep those jobs in the US and lower costs at the same time.  That isn’t always the case, but it is very gratifying when it is.”

Opportunities for supply chain enhancement are everywhere – and SCS specializes in finding them.  It often requires a lot of investigating, and the challenge is to find the changes that will have the most impact, and that senior leadership will embrace as company-wide, top-priority initiatives.

“We used to focus on collaboration between companies,” said COO Jim Ward.  “Our roots were in helping companies – even competitors like Haworth and Steelcase – to figure out what parts of the supply chain they had in common, and how to be more efficient, lower costs and reduce waste by sharing resources.”

That approach worked.  Today, it’s been expanded and is probably best modeled at SCS’s West Coast location in Ontario, California.  There, SCS opened a multi-client facility where freight coming into the United States from Asia – or heading out – travels through it.  “This center in particular works because it brings together a number of shared resources that allow our clients to have decreased inventories, more reliable delivery schedules and improved tracking and visibility throughout the supply chain,” said Brand.

Some of the resources that are shared include: inbound and outbound freight costs, work force talent and pay, rent, truckloads traveling to common delivery locations, inspection and packaging costs, and the ever-important knowledge of the staff on Foreign Trade Zone and other complicated requirements of doing business globally. 

“Under this scenario, service to the end-user increases while costs go down,” said Brand.

A key element of SCS’s success is technology.  After developing customized supply chain visibility programs for large office furniture manufacturers, the company launched SCIntech, its technology division.  The goal of SCIntech is to ensure that at any given time of any given day, clients, vendors, suppliers and customers can know exactly where in the process – from manufacture to delivery – their product is.   

“SCIntech has been critical to our success,” said Ward. “It makes the technology side of the supply chain more affordable, quicker and seamless.”

Supply Chain Solutions, Inc. has a freight management division called Supply Chain Shipping, and is addressing two other major challenges facing companies today through other divisions. First, it has started Supply Chain Sourcing to help manufacturers lower the total landed cost of their products. Second, it will launch Supply Chain Diversity later this month, which is an initiative to help OEMs and major suppliers find, train and work with more minority owned businesses. 

“Giving more people the opportunity to be a part of American industry is important to us,” said Brand.  “There are incredible career paths out there in logistics and we want to help people secure these jobs.”

The idea for Supply Chain Diversity was born when SCS worked with a Michigan-based Native American tribe who wanted to become a Delphi supplier.  The initiative helped keep jobs in the US, keep transportation costs lower than sourcing offshore would have, and created a win-win situation for all of the companies involved. 

 “There are so many companies out there looking for answers to the complicated questions related to sourcing and distribution” Brand said. “It’s not going to get any easier, so we want to position companies to remain profitable and grow.”