Now days, it is essential for organizations to develop a vital relationship with their suppliers to effectively manage their supply chain. Due to primary focus on customer relationship management and higher sales, enterprises historically may have overlooked the opportunities and benefits that better Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) can deliver. However this is changing and many organizations have started realizing the importance of building strong relations with their suppliers. This realization has turned into the need for streamlined and improved processes between buyers (organizations) and suppliers, and organizations are striving to create innovative strategies to effectively manage their supply chain. However, very few companies around the globe have proven excellence in delivering innovative supplier relationship management strategies. One of them is State of Flux, an expert in delivering supply chain and SRM solutions.
Headquartered in London, UK, State of Flux has been supporting clients in procurement for over 14 years. It has grown into a leading procurement and supply chain consultancy, providing contract lifecycle management, category management and strategic sourcing, and supplier management services. It works with clients globally, and has offices across Europe and Asia Pacific.
The company helps large organizations achieve both financial as well as non-financial benefit by working with strategic suppliers to identify innovative and collaborative ways to compete in an ever changing market environment.
An Adroit Leadership
Alan Day, Chairman and Founder, is responsible for State of Flux’s major client accounts and developing its business outside of the UK. Having entered procurement and supply chain with a desire to learn about organizations operations from customer need to fulfillment, he now has over 25 years of experience in designing and implementing best practice.
Prior to founding State of Flux in 2004, Alan held roles as Director of Procurement and Supply Chain at Cable & Wireless, and Director of Accenture’s Supply Chain European Centre of Excellence, where his clients included British Airways, Shell, Microsoft, BSkyB and Morgan Stanley.
Alan started his supply chain career at Fisher & Paykel, the leading New Zealand-based manufacturer of domestic appliances. His passion for learning is truly appreciable. To retain his passion, he is currently undertaking a course on block chain at Oxford University.
An Award Winning Collaborative Platform
State of Flux provides a collaborative platform called Statess for managing supplier relationships, performance and productivity. In 2012, it became the first SRM software solution to receive a Gartner Cool Vendor Award. It was also the first company to introduce a fully integrated supplier innovation capability in 2013. More recently, State of Flux was presented a Spend Matters ‘Company to Watch’ award and was nominated for the Procurement Leaders Collaboration Award.
Through this novel platform, State of Flux envisions continuing to focus on growth and innovation in solutions that help drive productivity across clients’ supplier management programs. It also strives to expand its partner ecosystem of best-in-class providers of spend analysis, sourcing, P2P and sustainability / corporate social responsibility (CSR).
Fulfilling Clients Needs with Hands on Approach
State of Flux understands that each client is different and therefore their offerings are tailored to the organizations they work for. They have learned something new and overcome new challenges with each and every past project, supporting procurement functions with procurement transformation, navigating complex organizations, helping to raise existing levels of maturity, readiness for deployment and managing resistance to change. Every project has added to its experience and strengthened its proposition.
Driving Future with Emerging Technologies
State of Flux is growing internationally and envisages helping more clients with supplier management and supplier technology challenges. According to a survey carried out by the company in its annual SRM research, 8 out of 10 global companies are looking to drive benefits from supplier innovation. To respond these needs, its collaborative platform, Statess 2.0, license and support packages offer flexible plans which enable organizations to apply technology to the areas of utmost business need. Packages start with the core elements of relationship management including a space for collaborative working for both buyers’ and sellers’ and a dynamic dashboard of live data showing the status of the relationship, which is tailored depending on the user.
State of Flux has more recently created a flexible choice of modules for its customers in terms of performance, risk, contracts, innovation, CSR, program management, benefits management and category management. This is a scalable approach where an organization can start with performance and add risk or contracts management later.
Longer term, State of Flux believes that supplier management is becoming more of a professional discipline with its own set of qualifications, structure and career path. With the emergence of technology, the company is observing that more organizations are opting for supplier management as a service and embracing supplier management technology. Within these technologies there is further emergence of AI capability and block chain opportunities including smart contracts. The company is investing in these areas and envisions delivering smarter procurement solutions to help clients meet these needs worldwide.
Source :-The 10 Best Performing Supply Chain Solution Providers 2018