For supply chain collaborations to effectively drive innovation, supply chain collaboration software must also be innovative. This innovative software reduces the amount of paperwork generated during a collaboration; as well as brings together siloed, disparate management systems that plague the collaborative process.

When is it time to reach for supply chain collaboration software? Even more importantly, is this kind of software really worth the cost?

Read on to find out. 

Why Do You Need Supply Chain Collaboration Software?

Supply chain collaborations inspire creativity up and down the product line. However, supply chain collaborations also result in a lot of paperwork. If you’re not sufficiently organized, a supply chain collaboration could push your office over the edge.

How so? Consider this: supply chain collaborations start with inter-business negotiations. Negotiations, however, will quickly fall apart if you and your peers don’t have an established goal for your collaboration. Keeping track of your goals isn’t an easy process, especially if you’re new to the collaborative scene. If you don’t stay on track, you’ll miss out on the many benefits of working with your supply chain peers.

These collaborations are growing in popularity because supply chain representatives are still learning how to create partnerships where both companies benefit. There are two types of supply chain collaborations, which your business can partake in.

Vertical Collaborations

Vertical supply chain collaborations occur when two or more businesses at different stages in the supply chain join forces to drive improvement. Ideally, all of the businesses involved will experience an increase in the quality and frequency of their product output.

Horizontal Collaborations

Horizontal collaborations, comparatively, bring together businesses that operate on the same point in the supply chain. Together, businesses involved in these collaborations are able to create think-tanks and resource pools, from which all affiliates can pull.

What is a Supply Chain Collaboration Software?

Supply chain collaboration software allows you to house all of the collaboration’s initial paperwork for negotiations, outputs, and resources under one technological roof. You won’t have to worry about digging through your email to find the agreed-upon guidelines of the collaboration.

Instead, you can reference a single platform to determine what your output should look like, how your business is benefiting, and what services or tools you should be providing to your collaborative partners.

As a bonus, you can frequently revisit your collaboration goals and revise them as necessary. 

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What are the Benefits of Supply Chain Collaboration Software? 

Simpler, Better-Organized Goal-Sharing

As mentioned, you can use supply chain collaboration software to establish your initial goals for a sustainable supply chain collaboration. Those goals will vary based on the partners involved. More often than not, however, supply chain partnerships will form so that the businesses involved can:

• Facilitate more frequent and more fruitful communication
• Execute production in a smoother fashion
• Share information regarding production
• Overcome political stop-gaps that might otherwise delay or inhibit the production
• Comply with industry-wide legislation
• Gather data regarding a new audience or potential partner
• Pool resources in times when resources are either short or in development

With the help of supply chain collaboration software, you can set a collaborative goal with more ease, and revisit and revise your goals appropriately over time. 

Lower Your Operational Costs

With the help of supply chain collaborative software, you can graduate your business from one-off collaborations to partnerships that last for years on end.

Over time, the cost of these collaborations will lessen, allowing you to benefit from the resources without having to pay out of pocket. As a result, your business’s budget will increase, as will your revenue.

Refresh Your Creative Staff

Even the most creative staff members on your team are going to need rejuvenating after a while. Getting to know the software may take time, but your team can assess the output of your supply chain immediately – and give them an inventive boost.

Beyond that, your team can immediately supply feedback and critiques on changes throughout a collaboration, so your business can tweak its contributions until they’re picture-perfect.

Improve Inner-Industry Recommendations

Your business’s reputation is just as important as its products. The more you work with your peers up and down the supply chain, the more you can influence the cultivation of your business’s reputation.

When combined with the organization and operational success that comes with using supply chain collaboration software, you’ll quickly develop a referral chain that sets your business and its peers ahead of your competition.

Long-Term Success Tracking

Whether you’re accessing this data from your phone or from your desktop, you can track the cost and product benefits of a partnership as time progresses.

As such, you can more easily determine if a particular collaboration is beneficial. If it isn’t, you can use the supply chain collaboration software to propose alterations to your collaboration or to start networking elsewhere.

On-Demand Supply Chain Inspections

Just because you’re participating in a supply chain collaboration doesn’t mean you can’t request on-demand inspections. In fact, if you want collaboration to go smoothly, you’ll often need to audit potential partners in advance to make sure that you’re making a sound business decision.

Supply chain collaboration software will allow you to request these audits ahead of time. You can also view the results of these audits all in one place. If it turns out a potential partner needs to improve some of their business operations, you can wait to start a collaboration until they’ve risen to industry standards.

QIMAone and Your Next Supply Chain Collaboration

Supply chain collaboration software makes it easy to help businesses successfully communicate with members of their supply chain. 

QIMAone is designed for both new and mature businesses that are serious about driving improvement through supply chain collaboration. 

Our cloud-based quality and compliance management software offers versatility to match your complex supply chain structure; because it provides you with access to all of the tools you need to pull off a successful supply chain collaboration. 

Furthermore, this quality management platform is designed to meet your business’s individual needs, while frequently updating you on changing industry standards and the goals which you and your partners are trying to meet.

The QIMAone platform includes features like:

• Live chat across internal teams and supply chain partners
• Automated inspection booking
• Real-time QC inspection and audit monitoring
• Supply chain data collection and analysis
• Standardized and up-to-date inspection templates 
• Inter-industry communication
• Training tools to help partners improve their operations
• Benchmarking
• Specialized collaboration analytics
• 24/7 customer service

If you want to network with your supply chain or keep all of your collaboration-related documents under one roof, QIMAone can help.

Want to see how it works? Learn more about QIMAone applications by scheduling a demo today.