In the rigorous work of supply chain management, it’s good to have lots of partners on your side. That said, many supply chain managers often overlook the marketing team, one of the most valuable business partners they have.

Supply chain leaders from many of the world’s largest restaurant chains have admitted to ArrowStream that they do not effectively partner with their marketing colleagues to better understand the objectives, strategies and even timelines behind promotions. Instead, they just try to best react and support marketing efforts as they occur. What’s lost in this reactive stance is the ability to execute effective promotions that best leverage resources across the entire supply chain.

Consider this finding from ArrowStream’s 2nd Annual Foodservice Industry Survey: More than 75 percent of foodservice industry leaders cited problems with LTO (limited time offer) demand planning. Stock-outs and inventory obsolescence are devastating to promotions and those troubles erupt quickly into sales and customer loyalty and satisfaction challenges. When supply chain teams are not a part of the LTO/promotion planning process, their ability to deliver on timelines and prepare teams and trading partners is forfeit. Marketing is stuck with a supply chain team that can only “do their best under the circumstances” and the supply chain team is stuck scrambling. Neither position is an enviable or effective one.

So what will greater supply chain and marketing collaboration win a business in these still trying economic times? By partnering with marketing from the very start of promotional campaign development, supply chain teams serve as a valuable information resource to marketing partners. The result for marketing will be more effective promotions driven by greater insight into supply chain processes. The result for the supply chain organization will be early insight that allows teams to better prepare for and, therefore, better execute promotions. The result for the business: more traffic, greater sales, higher rates of customer satisfaction and increased revenue.

Common Sense Tips for Partnering with Marketing

Most supply chain teams know all too well the importance of good collaboration with the marketing team. Often, it’s just a lack of time that keeps them from best practices. Here are a few reminders of the simple, common sense collaboration practices that can help keep communications strong and collaboration effective:

• Meet Regularly - If you want to understand and support marketing’s efforts, you have to get to know them. Work with your marketing peers to establish a regular meeting schedule that will ensure you have a clear and constant picture of marketing’s calendar, goals and objectives and that marketing understands the work and resources required of the supply chain to meet their goals.
• Teach Supply Chain 101 - Marketing professionals have their own objectives and tough challenges to face, leaving them little time to learn the fundamentals of supply chain operations. However, just a small amount of knowledge can go a long way in helping your marketing counterparts understand the many factors that influence product movement, cost and timeliness. Take the time to educate marketing peers about what happens across the supply chain in order to ensure their promotions are fulfilled. Even job shadowing or one-day job swapping can provide a ton of insight that can help marketers more successfully plan marketing promotions and give your team important insight into the important work marketing does.
• Make Knowledge Sharing a Priority - When issues or changes occur in the supply chain that can affect marketing’s promotions and their execution, share the knowledge early and thoroughly. By making marketing a communication priority, supply chain leaders are establishing a powerful knowledge-sharing channel and building a relationship that will allow the teams to better partner and deliver together.
• Consider Technological Integration - Are there ways to better communicate and share information through the technology tools you have in place? Does your supply chain management solution integrate marketing into knowledge and information sharing? If not, it may be time to consider a more expansive supply chain solution that enables collaboration within the business and across supply chain trading partners. Remember, the greater the information integration is, the more informed, effective and reliable the supply chain will be.

Finally, if you should find marketing teams are resistant to sharing information or collaborating, ArrowStream recommends making your business case. Host a meeting or prepare a convincing fact sheet that demonstrates the many ways supply chains processes effect the timeliness and quality of promotions. Marketing professionals, like anyone in your company, are very busy but they are also committed to the same fundamental goals as the supply chain: increasing sales and customer loyalty and satisfaction. Reminding your marketing team of what a useful and powerful partner the supply chain can be is a great way to win support and help everyone work together to improve bottom-line business success.

The Web continues to change the way we work, and the latest milestone in this evolution is social media. How socially networked is your supply chain? Are you using tools like LinkedIn and Facebook to connect with your supply chain partners? Are you networked and engaging partners through user or sub-groups? If not, you are missing an opportunity to directly engage and collaborate with peers who have significant influence on your supply chain’s effectiveness.

While foodservice businesses have long known that social media is a powerful way to connect with consumers (think viral promotions and social networks for like-minded shoppers and coupons sharing), working social media into supply chain collaboration has been a slow-moving process. While the culprit may be skepticism of social media’s staying power, I believe the more likely culprit is time. Who in the precision world of supply chain management can spare even a moment for blogging, tweeting, updating their Facebook page?

What is important for supply chain managers to consider is how social media is changing the way people get information-even the information we rely on to do our jobs. How we research, get news and find referrals has migrated quickly to the Web due to social networking. Just a few years ago many supply chain professionals relied heavily on trade publications to give them insight into business trends and emerging technologies. Now more and more are meeting up online through groups on LinkedIn, Facebook and other social media sites to get the information directly from industry resources, peers and colleagues.

 As information sources and idea-sharing shift to online networks-supply chain professionals can use these mediums to create greater opportunities for collaboration. How? Here are several ways you can begin to leverage social media to your supply chain’s advantage:

Dedicate a Team Member
The realm of social media expands every day-as do the tools people use to connect and interact. It’s important to have one person on your supply chain team who can dedicate part of his/her time to researching where clients and partners are connecting online, building and maintaining communities, updating core sites with fresh content and staying on top of important trends.

Expand Your Network
If you and your team are only just getting started in social networking, the first step is to build your networks by registering on core sites-LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter-and building up your contact base. However, the big names are not the only names in social networking. Industries and interest groups are rapidly forming new social networking sites every day, so do some exploring to find out which niche industry and professional networks you should consider joining.

For example, there are many emerging sites for the supply chain and foodservice industries. Logipi recently launched an online business community dedicated to supply chain professionals while networks like Biteclub, FohBoh and Foodservice Rewards focus on the restaurant and foodservice industries. No matter how focused your career, interest or hobby, you are sure to find a social network dedicated to it today. Find a handful that are useful to you professionally and try them out.

Once you’ve built your online communities, get the word out to your customers, prospects, employees, personal contacts and other industry partners who you work with regularly. Place links directly on your website to your networks and start an email campaign inviting others to join.

Build a Common Interest Groups/Web Community
You can build an online group/community for your key supply chain partners. A small, focused online community allows you and your supply chain partners and suppliers to easily share ideas, ask questions and discuss best practices in a low-maintenance forum. It takes very little work and you would be surprised how quickly these turn into use information resources you and your peers turn to when stumped by a supply chain challenge.

Write a Blog
Business blogs can be a useful tool for sharing thought leadership and trends with your key partners. It allows you the chance to share a bit of expertise-establishing credibility-while giving your readers the chance to respond and create an interesting dialogue.

You can invite your partners to follow your company’s blog to help them understand your business better and you can do the same by following their blogs and news. The key is to make sure content is refreshed regularly and you are sharing information that can help your partners and clients do their jobs better.

These four steps are a good way to build a foundation of social networking activity that can bring you closer to the supply chain collaborators with whom you want to stay in close contact. As your networks strengthen, you will find that you are rewarded for sharing valuable content by partners and peers who will reciprocate with knowledge, referrals and news that can help you do your job better and improve your supply chain management.

For even more insights, news and resources; check out ArrowStream’s online communities:

Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/arrowstream)

LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/groups?trk=anet_ug_hm&gid=2121229&home=)

Twitter (http://twitter.com/ArrowStreamInc)