Top 3 Reasons Delivery-Quality Monitoring Is Costing You Money

Delivery-quality monitoring is a crucial aspect of managing your supply chain and ensuring efficiency. However, using it ineffectively can drain your business's expenses and leave you unprepared for supply chain disruptions. 

Active monitoring is a more cost-effective and proactive way to manage your supply chain. Understanding quality monitoring and how it costs you money is an essential step in enhancing your monitoring system and implementing stronger capabilities. 

Learn more about the types of quality monitoring, how passive monitoring can cost you money and how to use active monitoring to improve your supply chain's performance.

What Is Quality Monitoring?

Pharma, CDMO and 3PL spaces monitor the quality of their supply chains to track product and service quality during various stages of the logistics cycle. Quality monitoring helps companies maintain efficiency and effectiveness throughout their supply chain, especially when using vendors and third parties. 

For example, the pharma industry produces and distributes large amounts of medicine and vaccines that require special care and storage. Quality monitoring helps ensure correct handling of these products from production through delivery. This process allows you to make logistical decisions that will benefit your business, ensuring your partners handle your products effectively and move them through the supply chain efficiently.

Active vs. Passive Monitoring in the Supply Chain

Quality monitoring generally falls into two types — active and passive: 

• Passive: On the most basic level, passive monitoring is observation. This type of monitoring provides high levels of visibility into various parts of your supply chain. However, you typically have to spend time analyzing it to determine your next steps. Passive monitoring statistics are valuable, though they only do you so good if you don't know what to do with them.
• Active: Active monitoring takes quality monitoring a step further, giving you more control, insights and guidance regarding what to do next. Active monitoring allows you to be more involved in the supply chain beyond what visibility offers. Active monitoring typically provides a more detailed look at individual instances rather than broad-level information from passive monitoring. Both can be beneficial in certain ways, though active monitoring is typically more cost-efficient. 

3 Reasons Why Your Current Monitoring Is Costing You Money

If you strictly use passive monitoring, you're likely spending more money for less logistical insight and capabilities. Here are three reasons passive quality monitoring may be costing you money:

• You're paying for visibility only: While visibility is important for any type of monitoring, stopping at visibility can cost you more over time. Visibility can only tell you so much, especially if you don't know how to turn insights into actions. 
• You get insights but not next steps: The most basic level of quality monitoring only provides insights and can leave you questioning where to go from there. If you're seeking guidance for your next steps, you may spend more money on additional services or technology to help you analyze insights and make logistical decisions.
• You're unable to prevent or pivot from in-transit challenges: When challenges arise within your supply chain, basic quality monitoring can leave you stranded. Simply monitoring your products in transit doesn't necessarily help you prevent or recover from potential issues. While being able to identify these issues is crucial, it can also be a waste of money if you can't do anything about it.

In other words, quality monitoring is only the first part of the process. Paying for quality monitoring alone means spending money with little to no real benefits. You need to be able to go beyond supply chain monitoring to predict and prevent supply chain issues to get the most out of your investment.

How to Go Beyond Passive Monitoring in the Supply Chain

To make the most of your supply chain monitoring, you need to know how to improve quality monitoring and use those insights toward a more proactive solution. An active approach offers more than just visibility, saving you money in the long run. Going beyond passive monitoring in your supply chain management methods gives you more capabilities and preventive solutions. For example, artificial intelligence (AI) and digital twins can help take you beyond passive monitoring. 

Here's how these types of tools go beyond monitoring your supply chain:

• AI solutions: AI technology can help you prevent supply chain disruptions. These tools use predictive analytics to anticipate future changes in various supply chain areas. They can make suggestions during decision-making and automate workflows to improve areas that commonly have disruptions. AI goes beyond monitoring to allow your business to make quick decisions and see real-time results.
• Digital twin modeling: Digital twins are virtual models of a physical process or product, allowing you to see how the elements function in real-time without impacting your supply chain. For example, you could use digital twin modeling to simulate the change rather than testing a process change within your supply chain. This method allows you to see how the change would work without causing delays. Digital twins also allow you to experiment with changes to determine what will have the most positive effect on your cycle.

Combining supply chain visibility and quality monitoring with the right logistics integrations can give you the most comprehensive management tools. By turning real-time insights into proactive communication throughout your supply chain ecosystem, you can anticipate, identify and address supply chain issues before they result in significant delays. This ability is part of what makes going beyond supply chain monitoring more cost-effective. 

Passive monitoring only allows you to identify supply chain issues once they've happened. By the time you're able to implement corrective action, you may lose valuable time and resources. Logistics solutions allow you to monitor your supply chain while benefiting from active tools that can improve supply chain efficiency and performance.

Enhance Quality Monitoring in Supply Chains With ParkourSC

If you're looking for ways to reduce costs and improve overall performance across your supply chain, consider implementing a more proactive approach with ParkourSC. Our software and supply chain solutions provide advanced insights to help you plan effectively and make improved business decisions. Our comprehensive logistics management platform gives you the necessary visibility while providing the tools to proactively prepare for disruptions or grow your business. 

With numerous uses in the pharma, 3PL and CDMO industries, ParkourSC can help you take control of your cost savings business growth. Learn more about our platform and how we can help you achieve the active monitoring your business needs.