Cloud Supply Chain For Savvy Brands.pdf

Make Your Supply Chain a Competitive Advantage

Introduction

Luckily, these struggles are things of the past.

Remember enterprise IT before cloud computing became the norm?

Let’s paint the picture.

Tech teams were in a constant arms race to provide sufficient storage and computing power to keep up with their company's and users' needs.

The result? Large capital investments in physical real estate to house computers and servers coupled with ongoing maintenance and expansion to support growth.

Demand planning was near impossible. Underestimate your needs, and you fall short on speed and user experience, while overestimating meant unnecessarily high costs that hindered profit margins.

Today's technology companies leverage cloud computing providers. It’s simple: instant access to elastically-scalable computing and storage capacity. This means the provider, seemingly by magic, scales up and down to provide exactly what you need, when you need it, without the unnecessary cost or complexity.

What does this have to do with supply chain?

Most supply chains—even in 2022—are still running like a 1990s IT stack. Just like how companies added additional real estate and servers as they grew in the 1990s, today’s brands piece together disparate facilities and 3PLs as their needs increase.

Brands now rely on expensive, disconnected, and inflexible pieces to make up their supply chains, which slow growth, hinder customer experience, and create massive operational burdens.

Imagine a fully-integrated, infinitely-elastic, and consistently-optimized supply chain, delivered as a scalable utility. Here’s how Cloud Supply Chain is making this a reality.

Inefficient and Fragmented Systems Hinder Growth

The main challenges for supply chains today center around the disconnected, disparate players at each point of operation. If a brand wants to scale or make changes, they're limited in how fast and how impactful they can be.

With rapidly-growing consumer demand and shifting preferences to favor omnichannel commerce, supply chains are under greater strain than ever. Brands have been forced to adjust their operations to keep up with these shifts, which were further accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the absence of end-to-end, fully-connected solutions, most brands have been forced to rely on several partners and systems, each covering only a portion of their overall supply chains that are not built to work interoperably.

This fragmentation creates an intricate maze of interdependent, but often disconnected, operations. Failure at one point creates a ripple effect across the entire chain. With so many points of failure, brands expose themselves to significant risk. Meanwhile, optimization is near impossible. The cost of aggregating and analyzing all of the relevant data is massive. And even if you can do it, any practical optimization requires disassembling and then reassembling this complex maze. Too often the barriers are too great, and brands are forced to settle for cumbersome, under-optimized operations.

The Result of Today’s Supply Chain Inefficiencies

Relying on a network of disparate systems creates a headache for brands. The outcomes are unappealing:

An out-of-control customer experience

When you don’t have a complete, real-time picture of your supply chain, the experience you offer customers suffers.

This could look like:

Lack of flexibility and scalability

It’s very hard to make changes to your current supply chain—you’re typically locked into the systems and partners that you have.

So, what happens when demand or business needs change?

You lack flexibility and scalability in your supply chain to be able to:

Can’t optimize quickly

Brands need to be able to optimize their entire supply chain holistically. If the system is fragmented, changing one piece won’t impact the rest of the chain—at least not fast enough to realize the desired benefit.

Difficult planning and high costs

Without an elastic supply chain, the cost of expanding operations to keep up with customer expectations and growth is incredibly expensive. In addition, it’s difficult to plan and predict how those costs will change over time, since visibility is limited.

Let’s Skip to the Good Part: Cloud Supply Chain

The good news? With a modern Cloud Supply Chain approach, the problems brands face today go the way of floppy disks, tape recorders, and 1990s IT stacks.

By partnering with a Cloud Supply Chain provider, you no longer have to think about scaling your logistics infrastructure to meet your growing needs or poring over Excel sheets to get a handle on inventory levels and facility performance—these issues become obsolete.

Chain Solutions

So what is Cloud Supply Chain?

Complete port-to-porch logistics inclusive of transportation, warehousing, and fulfillment for B2B and B2C from easy management, total order and access.

Hand-in-hand partnership with Stord's team of experts to make sure that your supply chain is a true competitive advantage including network analysis, training, and regular optimization.

01 End-to-End Logistics
02 Supply Chain Software 03 Supply Chain Intelligence

How it Works

The Future of Supply Chains

Today

BRAND

TRANSPORTATION
WAREHOUSING
LAST MILE
SOFTWARE

Tomorrow

BRAND

The Benefits of Cloud Supply Chain

Cloud Supply Chain enables:

Never interview another 3PL partner again. Instead, the right Cloud Supply Chain provider allows you to scale up or down, move inventory to appropriate regions, and automatically predict and respond to supply chain needs without a prerequisite headache. This is possible because of a fully-integrated, pre-vetted, hybrid network of over 1,000 warehouses and 20,000 shipping carriers that you can tap into without having to negotiate new contracts, establish new processes, or implement and integrate new systems.

With a single source of truth for a brand’s entire supply chain, accessible wherever in the Cloud, businesses can manage their supply chain and optimize for customer experience and growth instead of worrying about individual logistics site-level performance.

When disparate systems are replaced with Cloud Supply Chain, true efficiency and optimization are realized. For example, you no longer need to pull reports from multiple different systems and partners to track inventory and orders. Instead, all of the data you need is in one place — making opportunities for optimization easier to uncover while saving you time and resources. The result? An improved experience for brands, customers, and employees, lower costs, faster fulfillment with unmatched order accuracy, greater confidence as you grow, and more.

Cloud Supply Chain transforms business' logistics from cumbersome cost centers to agile competitive advantages. When your supply chain performs with the speed, flexibility, and elasticity of the cloud, your customers are happier, your team is more confident, and you grow faster. Unlock your competitive advantage today.

About Stord

Stord offers freight, fulfillment, warehousing, packaging, and parcel / last mile delivery for B2C and B2B with the integrated software you need to orchestrate, scale, and optimize your entire supply chain.

For companies moving physical goods, Stord is the cloud supply chain platform that combines the speed and flexibility of the cloud with the physical supply chain infrastructure required to compete. Stord's cloud software connects to your existing systems with a single integration, providing an unmatched ability to analyze and optimize your entire supply chain, including inventory.

Stord's platform is backed by a first-party warehouse network that reaches 99% of the U.S. in 2 days or less, augmented by a premier partner network of thousands of facilities and transportation carriers available when and where you need capacity, ensuring orders are delivered on time and to the right place.