Portada partner CMO Council recently published the following report on making marketing supply chains more efficient. The report, called: "Define Where to Streamline, Making Marketing Supply Chains More Efficient, Agile and Enviro Friendly" had the following key findings.
Sponsored by NVISION, the global online audit tapped the perspectives of 306 marketers from multi-national companies of all sizes across 23 different industry sectors. The goal was to provide the first comprehensive view of marketing supply chain demands, dynamics and deliverables, while also evaluating the productivity, value and level of integration and control in this vital marketing operational sector.
It appears marketers still need to gain a comprehensive grasp of their marketing supply costs, purchasing effectiveness and environmental impact. The market engagement process found a significant number of marketers did not integrate or align supplier resources across their organizations and many use multiple procurement platforms distributed across functional silos, not a single, integrated and transparent requisition system.
The study also revealed marketers are challenged to better manage, streamline and automate a highly complex and disconnected process that is essential to go-to-market effectiveness and competitive advantage. Too few are taking a strategic look at supply chain responsive and business value, auditing cost components, analyzing procurement data, or regularly reviewing supplier performance and yield.
The route to realizing sustainability gains and carbon footprint reductions in marketing supply chains requires more ownership, insight and accountability. The marketing supply chain is ripe for sustainability improvement and marketers need to be ardent innovators when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, natural resource waste, and energy consumption. There are many cost savings to be gained, while also being able to project a more socially responsible face to consumer, trade, regulatory and investor audiences.
Nearly two-thirds of respondents in the Define Where to Streamline audit – 63.6 percent – said they are targeting print production, warehousing and delivery of marketing consumables for greater sustainability improvements. And 37.1 percent said they were looking at transportation and logistics as a way to reduce carbon footprints.
Introducing lean and green business practices in supply chains will enable marketers to fi nd cost savings and efficiency improvements from many of the greatest areas of spend. Specifically, the production, storing, shipping and purging of print, promotional and point-of-sale materials that are a big part of marketing consumables spend. And while green is just one strategy to supply chain optimization, marketers overwhelming agree that more can be done to address global warming across the $1.5 trillion in marketing spend annually.
The study was conducted by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council in partnership with the Business Performance Management (BPM) Forum (www.bpmforum.org) and the Institute for the Study of Business Markets (ISBM) – a global academic-industry consortium run by Penn State – to benchmark management effectiveness of marketing supply chains worldwide.
The global online audit, Define Where to Streamline, is the first in a series of thought leadership programs by the Marketing Supply Chain Institute. This new think tank has been set up to assist chief marketing executives drive performance improvements, operational efficiencies and cost reductions across their service provider value chains and agency ecosystems.
