Our first story is about Telus one of Canada’s biggest retailers, with 400 stores dotted around the country as well as one of the biggest infrastructure investors in Canada. Back in 2012, managing massive FRAGMENTED inventories of spare parts was a major challenge for Telus. Technicians responsible for repairing systems and equipment struggled to find spare parts as inventories were managed by different business units and at a local geographic level. Not being able to find spare parts resulted in problems taking longer to solve and customers being exposed to potential service disruptions. To solve this problem, Telus took up a new supply chain design; she launched the National Managed Spares Program. Telus began to make use of a centralised planning, consolidated into one IT platform and implemented a new operational practise. This made it possible for all technicians to get easy access to spare parts when they need them.
When it comes to the world’s most powerful brands, Coca-Cola is still number one. The iconic beverage maker has dominated the global soft drink market for more than a century. Have you ever wondered why the Nigerian government keeps complaining of inability to reach out to some villages but you go there to find out that they drink coke in every of their occasions and sell it in their retail stores? The reason is not far-fetched; this bottling company has a working supply chain design. First and foremost, 95% of their beverages are made in the countries where they are sold. By keeping manufacturing and sourcing local, the Coca-Cola company is able to minimise production time.

Now let’s come home to our vaccination program in Nigeria. One of the major priorities of the National Routine Immunisation Strategic plan (2013-2015) was to guarantee 100% adequacy of bundled quality vaccines for safe immunisation at all times. Formerly a mixed push system was used but this had its own challenges like chaos in the system and longer delivery time. The push plus delivery of vaccines which is depicted in the diagram attached to this write up, was begun with the intention to reduce the number of Nodes (length of the supply chain) along the vaccine distribution chain. So far, there has been significant improvement in vaccine delivery with this change of supply chain design.
We have come to the end of our supply chain talk guys. We cannot exhaust the very wonderful success stories recorded by organisations and firms as a result of having a good supply chain design. Your story could be the next! Choose SCM today!