Building sustainable supply chains to support business strategies

Supply chain performance is critical to creating business value. However, uncertain market access, growing customer expectations, economic shifts, supplier reliance and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) requirements can make consistent value creation a highly complex equation. Amid this dynamic landscape, organizations seek to build resilient supply chains that support and accelerate their business strategies.

Nearly one-third of executives in our latest CGI Voice of Our Clients research cite the high impact of supply chain reconfiguration on their organizations’ ability to reduce risks and increase resiliency. CGI's business consultants partner with clients to transform their supply chains to become more, resilient, sustainable, agile, and customer centric. Our consulting services include exploring the responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI) and leveraging digital twins to fortify supply chains against uncertain and continually evolving market and customer dynamics.

Parcels and workers in the shipping department

A holistic approach to improving supply chain performance

Investing to enable long-term supply chain performance strengthens resilience, agility and competitiveness. It is also crucial to reducing dependence on uncertain sourcing, developing more eco-friendly logistics solutions, and protecting brand reputation.

At the same time, investments are also needed to empower operational employees by using digital and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to implement faster, better and more consistent decision-making closer to customers.

Our Supply Chain Consulting services help industry leaders transform their supply chain strategies, processes, tools, organization and ecosystem, and competencies to deliver sustainable performance.

Key services include

  • Chief Supply Chain Officer Advisory: Providing guidance on a global performance management and improvement system, supply chain organization and transformation, ecosystem management, knowledge management and learning organization, customer/employee-centric transformation, enterprise architecture and innovation
  • Diagnostics: Assessing and making recommendations on operational issues, including operational and On Time & In Full (OTIF) performance, inventory quality, planning adherence, IT and data strategy, supplier risks, production and supply chain performance diagnostics and maturity, to provide actionable recommendations
  • Strategic Design: Designing a resilient supply chain, including risk management, strategic sourcing, cost-to-serve optimization, industrial and logistics network design, supply chain finance, and ecosystem design
  • Planning and Flow Redesign: Assisting in strategic planning, including predictive demand analytics, sales and operations planning (S&OP), integrated business planning, global demand and inventory optimization, simulating flow to reduce the "bullwhip" effect, making the right flow policy choices, reducing lead time and improving OTIF
  • Planning and Operations Synchronization: Designing and implementing an operational end-to-end control and support tower, ensuring alignment on S&OP decisions and their operational implementations, and enabling supply chain data referential consistency

Our approach to delivering sustainable results

Our Supply Chain Consulting services assist clients in orchestrating a transformative supply chain journey, supported by three distinct differentiators:

  • Alignment for outcomes: We integrate the four essential components—customers, profit, planet, and people—to create a supply chain that thrives in the long term. By harmonizing these elements within the context of clients’ industries and unique business environments, we provide a framework that helps clients align profitability with stakeholder expectations and ESG responsibilities.
  • Vision for ecosystem value chain approach: Our supply chain recommendations encompass a holistic view of your entire supply network. We consider the complete journey, from raw materials to end-users, to develop strategies that increase resilience, optimize efficiency, mitigate risks, and enhance overall performance.
  • Enablement through technology, including digital twins: We harness the power of technology, including supply chain digital twins, to enhance our recommendations. This enables us to help clients leverage real-time data, simulation, and AI capabilities, resulting in robust insights and more reliable projections.
Warehouse workers packaging tomatoes for shipping

What you can expect

Our supply chain consultants bring together deep industry knowledge, technology expertise and global experience to assist clients in orchestrating a transformative supply chain journey. 

We offer the following services:

  • Diagnosis and strategic design studies to integrate the impact on performance.
  • State-of-the-art supply chain process designs to facilitate data-driven decision-making closely tied to operational activities, leveraging the most valuable industrial practices.
  • Flow studies within warehouses and factories and between suppliers and clients to apply industrial best practices.
  • Implementation of S&OP processes to coordinate all stakeholder activities, whether central or at industrial and logistic sites, integrating modern business planning processes for economic re-forecasting.
  • Program steering studies and implementation of inventory and working capital requirements reduction.
  • Solution selection from the best global and local solution providers based on the organization's needs and a deep understanding of technological advancement (AI, data platforms).
  • Design of supply chain business architecture and implementation of transformation program steering, change management, training, testing, etc.
  • Reinforcement of teams' operational missions (supplier capacity management, supply planner, capacity planner).
  • Set up of a supply chain control tower to help operational teams anticipate and address challenges, capitalize on knowledge related to encountered problems, and advance companies' know-how. This is complemented by a digital control tower equipped with simulation and learning capabilities to achieve superior sustainable performance.

Cases in point

Our business consultants collaborate with client executives to think boldly and act pragmatically to achieve desired business outcomes. Here are examples of proven use cases where we have supported our clients' supply chain transformation journeys.

Manager and employee talking at manufacturing factory
Providing a leading utility with recommendations to quantify and analyze supply chain greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions
Helping a food services company transform its value chain with a new production, distribution, and services (NPDS) model
  • Developed a clear transformation roadmap with a 10-year horizon.
  • Assessed alignment of needs with market solutions and existing ones and defined the target architecture.
  • Defined target processes for demand management and modeled 40 business processes by business domain across short-, medium-, and long-term timeframes.
  • Defined the structure of functional principles across the entire supply chain perimeter.
Designing the future of a sustainable supply chain for a Swedish manufacturing company
  • Conducted executive workshops at the CGI Supply Chain Center of Excellence in Lyon to envision the future of the supply chain.
  • Developed a three-year logistics master plan to implement an end-to-end supply chain strategy.
  • Implemented a sustainable approach of optimizing the supply chain to reduce carbon footprint and remove all plastics and their single use.
  • Supported warehousing teams in their logistics process and system evolution by implementing best-in-class business process intelligence software.
  • Supported the expansion of international business operations and business model evolution.
Driving demand and production planning efficiency for a German pump and valve manufacturer
  • Scaled and defined logistics flows.
  • Mapped all logistics and documentation flows from the bid solicitation to the expedition of the product.
  • Reviewed the demand planning processes (long- and short-term impact on operations).
  • Defined governance and the associated organization.
  • Optimized processes decreased the workload of the nuclear team.
  • Enabled better alignment between customer requirements and operational capabilities.
Shaping a pull demand-driven supply chain using sales prediction for an international electricity and gas company
  • Deepened analysis of macro processes and methods of working, benchmarking with "best in class" supply chain players.
  • Envisioned a new model to generate a sales prediction to achieve the "Zero On-Site Outage Delivered" goal through machine learning (ML) and AI algorithms.
  • Designed processes and target organization, data and impacts on the current organization and set up the change plan.
  • Led the execution with program management using a modular and sequenced approach, including training more than 100 users.
  • Measured the results, including ROI and CO2 emission reduction.

By connecting strategy to execution and bridging competing imperatives, we help clients think boldly and act pragmatically through our business consulting services.

Learn how we combine decades of consulting experience and a deep understanding of our clients' operations with best practices, tools, and frameworks to accelerate results.

Read our blog for related insights

team members collaborating in front of white board