Optimizing supply chain operations from the lens of your customers 

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Supply chain performance used to be evaluated from a single lens: cost. Focusing solely on minimizing costs, however, led to slow and underperforming supply chains for both internal teams and end customers. A modern-day supply chain must balance three competing factors: sales, profitability, and customer experience. At Summit, we believe an optimal supply chain puts customer goals first and centers sales and profitability goals around customer needs.

Bolstered by an experienced team of business operators, program managers, analytics engineers, and technologists, our Summit team provides a unique mix of operators and technologists that help you optimize supply chain operations with a multifaceted approach from the customer’s point of view. By blending operators and technologists, we focus on identifying the modern capabilities needed to improve the efficiency of your supply chain and then help you select the proper tools and technologies to enable those capabilities.

Our Phase Zero approach expedites this type of assessment. Phase Zero is typically a four to six week assessment that outlines strategic goals, defines current-state operating capabilities, highlights capability gaps and risks, and develops a go-forward plan. Through the Phase Zero process, our customers feel a sense of relief as they walk away with a clear understanding of the current state of performance and a go-forward plan to improve outcomes.

As part of Phase Zero, we leverage our proprietary supply chain analytics platform, Elevate. The platform consolidates data from any system, employing pre-built analytics across omnichannel, supply chain, and warehouse operations to expedite the assessment process. “With Elevate, we harnessed the collective knowledge of our team of industry experts to build the insights needed to run daily operations into a modern analytics platform. Our Summit powered by Elevate approach leverages that platform to accelerate all of our consulting services.” says Josh Mayer, CEO of Summit Advisory Team. Beyond the Phase Zero engagement, customers can also subscribe directly to the Elevate analytics platform and use it to improve operational performance on an ongoing basis.  

For instance, our team leveraged Phase Zero with an e-commerce company operating in the automotive industry with multiple subsidiary brands. The company wanted to standardize business capabilities across their family of brands that operated on different technology stacks. Summit’s team engaged with the company and led them through the Phase Zero process, which helped them align strategic goals, define current state capabilities and technical architecture, and outline a go-forward plan.  Summit then guided them in selecting ERP, OMS, WMS, and enterprise system bus solutions and led the execution of their supply chain transformation.

Summit provides industry-leading consulting services across six areas of focus: omnichannel operations, supply chain operations, warehouse operations, enterprise systems and architecture, organizational change management, and analytics. While other firms may offer a few of these six elements, our customers benefit from a holistic approach that combines all of these strategic areas of focus for any project. Commonly overlooked needs such as change management and analytics are incorporated into every customer project.  

Summit’s offerings go beyond advisory and assessment and extend into strategic planning, implementation, and operational auditing. Customers benefit from having a single partner throughout their transformational journey, starting by developing a strategic plan and then guiding customers through implementation until anticipated benefits are realized.