Rapidly shifting customer expectations and a highly competitive market have increased demands for faster product delivery through smarter, data-driven manufacturing. But OEMs won’t experience the full benefits of Industry 4.0, including hyper-efficient inventory management, lower warehousing costs and better customer experience, unless they fully optimize their supply chains.

The move to Supply Chain 4.0 means increased flexibility, enhanced visibility from end to end, and greater efficiency through granular transactions. Supply Chain 4.0 can lower operational costs by 30%, lost sales by 75%, and inventories by up to 75%, while significantly increasing supply-chain agility.

When devoting time and resources to modernization, OEMs often must choose between strategic goals and maintaining existing customer accounts and expectations. By monitoring customer trends and using predictive analytics and modeling, they can keep pace with customer demands through incremental improvements in procurement accuracy, order management and warehousing.

Today’s customers expect near-real-time delivery from OEMs, and legacy systems can’t keep up. Supply Chain 4.0 tools, including automation, both provide and rely on data analytics that improve parts-procurement accuracy and accelerate delivery speed. By connecting your warehousing, ordering, manufacturing, fulfillment and support data, your supply chain becomes an efficient, perpetually improving solution that can keep the manufacturing floor running at peak performance.

Through implementation of data-driven systems, you can improve the customer experience and meet demands for quote-to-order fulfillment, near-real-time order cancellation, and customer self-service. With automation technologies taking over repetitive tasks, you can reduce the potential for human error and improve operational efficiency. These solutions can also reduce your financial liability through better warehousing accuracy, and improved B2B communications channels. As your supply chain and manufacturing floor move toward a modernized, automated and integrated solution, you can focus on building more trusted, global partnerships.

Often, the value of next-generation technology gets overshadowed by costs, both in terms of financials and risks to existing customer accounts. But if you think you’re investment-constrained, think again. A supply-chain partner that provides global warehousing and logistics staff can free up your resources, so you can focus on scaling your technology-driven strategy without risking your incumbent status with customers. With flexible supply-chain services from a trusted partner handling logistics, customer management, billing, invoicing and more, you can rapidly realize the benefits of supply-chain and manufacturing modernization, while reducing overall costs and enhancing the customer experience.

Matt Smith is a business unit specialist at Tech Data Global Lifecycle Management .