Supply chain mapping is the process of visually representing your supply chain network geographically. In simple terms, it means plotting out where your customers are, where your warehouses and distribution centres sit, where your suppliers operate, and how goods actually flow between all of those points.
Most supply chain decisions are fundamentally spatial problems. Where should you put a new warehouse? Which DC should service which customers? How should you design your delivery routes? You can spend hours analysing spreadsheets, but until you see the data on a map, you’ll miss patterns that would otherwise be obvious.
Why You Should Map Your Supply Chain
Most businesses have the data they need to make better supply chain decisions. Customer addresses, order volumes, delivery costs, product margins. It’s all there in the ERP or TMS. The problem is, it’s stuck in rows and columns, and rows and columns don’t tell you much about geography.
Supply chain mapping takes that data and makes it visual. You plot your customers, your facilities, your delivery routes on a map, and suddenly things that were invisible in a spreadsheet become obvious. Customers being served from the wrong DC. A warehouse that’s in completely the wrong spot because demand shifted five years ago. Delivery routes that overlap or double back on themselves.
The thing is, you can’t solve spatial problems properly without a map. It sounds simple, and honestly, it is. But that’s the point.
Our Supply Chain Mapping Services
There are several types of supply chain mapping, each serving a different purpose. These Supply Chain mapping services have been introduced to meet our customers’ growing demand for a process that will graphically map aspects of their Supply Chain. This provides invaluable decision support. Our Supply Chain mapping includes:
Demand Density Mapping
‘See’ your customer demand graphically.
This Supply Chain Mapping service provides geocoded customer locations on a digital map, pictorially illustrating geographic demand. It gives you insights into distribution management that looking ‘at the numbers’ alone simply cannot provide.
The size of each customer’s symbol on the map can be set at various volume breakpoints, so you immediately see where demand is concentrated. Customers can be mapped based on customer type, customer sales levels, product group, or many other factors as required.
Use this graphical demand density mapping to support facility location decisions, demand trend analysis, and identification of new market opportunities.
One of the most valuable applications? Map your current demand against potential demand using population and demographics databases. This quickly highlights where your actual demand is lagging behind what the market could support, and where untapped growth opportunities exist.
This service can be provided remotely for any region globally.
Sales Territory Mapping
Get your customers better allocated to sales territories and sales staff to:
- Better service customers
- Improve sales resource utilisation
- Assess the impact of entering new territories
- Assess the impact of new products and services
This Sales Territory Mapping service has been used by many of our customers to validate the allocation of customers to sales representatives and sales areas.
The mapping can be based on the sales rep’s home location, or by ensuring an even spread of customers or sales volume across all reps. It gives you a clear visual picture of whether your current territory design actually reflects where your customers and demand sit today.
The sales territory map can also be used to estimate travel times and costs by rep, customer type, or region, which is often where the most immediate savings are found.
These Supply Chain Map services can be provided for any region globally and can even be provided via the Internet.
Gross Margin Mapping
Building on the mapping of customers and demand volume, it is possible to map gross margin contribution. This can be done by individual customer or by product group.
Volume and profitability don’t always go hand in hand. A region might represent a large share of your orders but contribute very little to your bottom line. Until you map it, that’s easy to miss.
Use our Gross Margin Mapping service to identify high-cost customer locations, spot expensive product and location combinations, and establish margin improvement opportunities.
This service works well alongside our full range of cost-to-serve services, and can be provided remotely for any location globally.
Customer/DC Allocation Mapping
Are your customers being serviced from the right locations?
The allocation of customers to specific Distribution Centres can often lead to inefficient distribution and higher than necessary costs. It’s one of those things that tends to evolve organically over time. A customer gets assigned to a DC when they first come on board, and nobody revisits it, even when the network has changed around them.
The customer allocation mapping process highlights where these allocations can be improved based on the time or distance from the DC. You can literally see on the map where customers are being served by a facility on the wrong side of the country when there’s a closer option available.
The result? Improved service times and reduced network costs. Often both at the same time, which is rare in supply chain, where you’re usually trading one off against the other.
Like all of our mapping services, this can easily be provided remotely via the Internet.
Isochrone Mapping
What is an isochrone? Think of it like a contour line on a map, except instead of joining points of equal height above sea level, it joins points of equal travel time or distance from a location. In our case, that location is usually a DC or factory.
Our isochrone mapping plots customers based on the travel time or travel distance from the DC that services them. Why is this important? Well, because a simple distance radius can often be misleading, as you could have two customers both being 150 kilometres from your DC; however one could be a two-hour drive, whilst the other is four hours, depending on roads, terrain, and congestion.
This technique is invaluable for testing different service lead times and understanding what service levels are really achievable. Use isochrone mapping to test different service lead times, group customers to logical service locations, assess service options for different regions, and indicate the number of service locations required for given service levels.
These Supply Chain Map services can be provided for any region globally and can even be provided via the Internet.
Centre of Gravity Mapping
This Supply Chain Mapping service provides a simple but effective indication of the ideal location for a centralised distribution centre.
It can be based on the centre of gravity of demand, the centre of gravity of supply, or the least cost distribution centre of gravity. So it can be used to test the location of a DC or a factory, for example.
The maths behind it is fairly straightforward. Each demand or supply point ‘pulls’ on the ideal location with a force proportional to its volume. The model finds the balanced point that minimises total weighted distance or cost. It’s not perfect on its own, but as a starting point for facility location decisions, it’s hard to beat.
This mapping will help indicate the best location for a facility from a service view, the best location from a cost view, and a range of alternative locations worth evaluating further.
This simplified model is based on generic warehousing and transport costs, but more detailed network modelling can be undertaken using your actual distribution costs for a more precise result.
These Supply Chain Map services can be provided for any region globally and can even be provided via the Internet. Our Supply Chain Map services have been built up over many years of experience in complex Supply Chain Network Modelling.
