The supply chain process: Step by step
This article is written by our partner, SAP Taulia The supply chain process influences how effectively you manage costs, mitigate risks, and meet customer expectations. Learn how to optimize each stage here. A guide to the supply chain process An effective and efficient supply chain is vital to the success of any business. It contributes significantly to overall financial health, increases resilience against adverse conditions, and plays a vital role in ensuring products are delivered on time to customers. By focusing on improving their supply chain processes, businesses can improve product quality, avoid inventory shortages or oversupply, increase customer satisfaction, protect against supply chain risks, and reduce costs. Stages of the supply chain A supply chain represents the flow of goods, materials, and services that underpin business operations, from sourcing raw materials to delivering finished goods. Each business has its own supply chain and is responsible for constructing and managing it to suit its unique objectives. Involving suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and customers, the supply chain process can be broken down into the following stages: 0. Establishing the supply chain One of the most important steps in the supply chain process comes before it’s up and running. That step is planning and establishing a supply chain that is finely tuned to your specific business needs, the sector you operate in, and the market you serve. During this step, you first need to decide on supply chain objectives and specify the metrics that will be used to monitor progress toward them. Then, move on to build your supply chain to suit those metrics. This includes supplier sourcing – the process of choosing suppliers to fulfil your need for goods and materials while also considering how well they serve your specific aims. At this initial stage, you can also consider how to achieve visibility over inventory flowing through the supply chain, and determine how you’ll integrate other technological processes like cash flow and demand forecasting. 1. Purchasing materials/goods With the sourcing of suppliers complete and the foundation of your supply chain well established, the supply chain process proper begins with purchasing raw materials and components. The purchasing process formalizes the way in which a company buys goods and services, meaning that spending can be carefully managed and tracked. By having guidelines in place for every part of their purchasing process, from negotiating contracts to approving purchase requests, companies can ensure that their purchasing practices match their business objectives while increasing efficiency and minimizing risk. 2. Manufacturing and inventory management The manufacturing process involves taking purchased raw materials and components and developing them into finished products. Although some manufacturing processes can be straightforward, modern manufacturing may include several steps that require products to pass through different facilities at various stages of completion. At this stage, the priority is to make sure that the materials or components supplied meet the required standards. Rigorous measurement of supplier performance, in terms of order fulfillment rates, price accuracy, and quality of goods, act as metrics to assess them against. It’s also increasingly common to track the flow of goods and materials throughout these steps, to facilitate inventory visibility. When complete, the final products must then be stored, so they’re ready for distribution to customers. Different options are available for this, each with their own pros and cons. The balance to be struck is between the cost of holding inventory and the speed with which you can fulfil orders. Using inventory management techniques to oversee both raw materials and finished products, you can take steps to optimize stock levels and improve how well your inventory warehousing and product delivery process serves your business objectives. 3. Delivering products to customers The distribution process involves the movement of finished products from storage to the end customer. Success here revolves around moving the right products, in the right quantity, on time, and to the correct location – all while managing costs. Depending on your business goals and the market in which you operate, you can either deliver products directly to customers or distribute them indirectly through partners or third parties such as agents, wholesalers, or retailers. Choices made at this stage of the supply chain process influence inventory cycle times and costs. Choosing the right distribution partners and tools can both drive efficiency and increase customer satisfaction levels. 4. Processing returns Inevitably, there will be occasions when customers return products. When goods are returned, they need to be checked to see if they meet the criteria for returns and refunds. They are either repackaged for resale or disposed of, with the relevant data entered into an inventory system. Refunds should be issued as quickly as possible, as customer relationships can be severely damaged if this process is mishandled. A smooth process, on the other hand, can strengthen customer relationships. Optimizing your supply chain process The supply chain process is a dynamic part of business operations, each stage of which can be optimized and refined to bring about efficiency. These are some of the most viable methods for improving the way your supply chain operates. Choosing the right supply chain model First and foremost, it’s essential that you adopt a supply chain model that fits both your unique objectives and the sector in which you operate. The main dichotomy in supply chain models is between lean and resilient. Lean supply chains seek to eliminate unnecessary expenditure, turning raw materials into finished goods with minimal waste and loss. Resilient supply chains are designed to adapt quickly to unanticipated events by holding safety stock and having a degree of supplier redundancy built in. The former approach is geared to ‘just-in-time’ inventory practices, and the latter ‘just-in-case’. The lean approach relies on all the supply chain steps functioning almost perfectly. Without safety stock, disruption from a single supplier could cause production to halt almost immediately. On the other hand, a resilient approach will come with greater storage costs and a greater risk of obsolescence while tying up more cash. Refining your approach to supply chain…
Franklin
On-Chain Settlement: Beyond the Hype and Into the Messy Middle
Written by Sharyn Tan (Views are my own) “Instant settlement” has become treasury’s favorite buzzword. The promise is intoxicating: transactions clearing in seconds, transparency no baked in, settlement risk vanishing into the ether. For treasurers drowning in reconciliation spreadsheets and chasing payment confirmations across time zones, it sounds like salvation. But here’s the part nobody mentions at conferences: most treasury systems still run in a batch-processed, end-of-day world. And honestly? For good reason. The Promise Is Real… So Are the Problems On-chain settlement does offer genuine advantages. Near-instantaneous confirmation. Reduced counterparty risk. A single, immutable record that should eliminate reconciliation nightmares. For treasurers managing global liquidity, the appeal is obvious: why wait T+2 for FX settlement when you could move value in minutes? But let’s be honest about what this actually requires: Your TMS wasn’t built for smart contracts. Your ERP speaks SWIFT, not blockchain. Your bank rec process assumes predictable cut-off times, not 24/7 activity. Your auditors want custody trails, not wallet addresses on an explorer. And your CFO still needs to explain to the board why the company is suddenly “doing crypto.” That’s before we discuss regulatory complexity, tax treatment ambiguity, or the operational reality that most of your team barely tolerates the current treasury platform. Questions the Optimists are not asking Do corporates actually need 24/7 settlement? Let’s be real: most corporate payments don’t require instant settlement. You’re paying suppliers on 30-60 day terms. Your FX hedges follow standard spots and forwards. Your debt service runs on predictable schedules. The treasury operations that genuinely benefit from instant settlement—emergency cross-border payments, just-in-time liquidity moves, rapid repatriation from more restricted jurisdictions—represent maybe 5-10% of daily volume for most corporates. Before rearchitecting your entire stack, ask: what percentage of your payments actually demands real-time settlement? And what’s the cost-benefit versus improving existing rails like instant payment schemes? Is it even possible to carry out without running into regulatory issues? Are we trading settlement risk for operational risk? Traditional settlement is slow but reversible, insured, and backed by tested legal frameworks. On-chain settlement is fast and final—which sounds great until you send payment to the wrong address, or a fraudulent transaction confirms before you can stop it. Smart contracts introduce new risks: code vulnerabilities, oracle failures, governance attacks. We’ve seen enough bridges collapse to know “trustless” doesn’t mean “riskless.” What happens when blockchain speed hits treasury controls? Treasury isn’t just about moving money quickly—it’s about moving it correctly. Your AP team needs three-way matching. Your FP&A team needs data that ties to forecasts. Your tax team needs entity-level tracking. Your compliance team needs sanctions screening before payment execution. Can your on-chain solution handle dual authorization? Enforce payment limits? Generate audit trails your external auditors actually accept? Or are you building an elegant blockchain system that creates a compliance disaster downstream? The Integration Reality: Not Pretty Even if you’re convinced on-chain settlement works for specific use cases, implementation is not straightforward. You need middleware translating blockchain confirmations into formats your TMS can ingest. Real-time reconciliation matching on-chain activity against your chart of accounts. Custody solutions satisfying both your security team (cold storage, multi-sig) and operations (payments before month-end close). And you’re doing all this while maintaining existing banking relationships as this isn’t replacement—it’s addition. More complexity, not less, at least for a period. The “last mile” problem is real: Getting that super-fast blockchain transaction to connect with all the slow, traditional enterprise systems that actually run your business. It’s like upgrading to fiber-optic internet at your house, but still having to print out your emails because your filing system only works with paper. The speed improvement is useless if you can’t integrate it into your actual workflow. In treasury terms: The blockchain moves the money fast, but the value only becomes real when your GL is updated, your cash position is accurate, your working capital forecast reflects it, and your auditors can verify it—and right now, there’s a huge gap between blockchain settlement and making all of that happen seamlessly. That gap? That’s the last mile. And it’s where many blockchain payment projects actually fail. A Treasurer’s Take: The opportunity isn’t replacing everything with blockchain. It’s creating optionality—having on-chain rails available for use cases where instant, transparent settlement genuinely creates value, while maintaining traditional systems for everything else. Think of treasury becoming multi-modal: some payments via instant schemes, some via correspondent banking, some via stablecoin rails—each chosen based on specific transaction requirements. The real question to ask: What Problem Are You Solving? On-chain settlement is a solution. But what’s your problem? Technology should follow the problem, not the other way around. And the honest assessment might be that for your treasury, traditional systems with incremental improvements deliver better risk-adjusted returns than a blockchain overhaul. That’s not failure. That’s good judgment. The Path Forward? On-chain settlement represents a genuine evolution in how value moves. For treasurers, it offers real benefits—when implemented thoughtfully, for appropriate use cases, with proper integration and controls. But we need to get past the hype and into the messy middle: the hard work of integration, honest cost-benefit assessment, realistic timelines for when this becomes mainstream infrastructure rather than experimental edge cases. The practitioners who succeed won’t be true believers or skeptics—they’ll be pragmatists whoidentify where on-chain settlement creates genuine value, build the integration layers that make it operational, and maintain the risk discipline treasury demands. The future isn’t purely on-chain or purely traditional. It’s hybrid, multi-modal, and boringly practical—using the right rails for the right payments at the right time. And that future is being built by treasurers willing to experiment carefully, fail small, learn quickly, and share honestly about what’s actually working. 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