Supply Chain Management Consulting Services: What? How? Why and When?
12 Jun 2025
Blog
Engaging a consultant for supply chain management consulting services is a big decision. As such, it’s important to have all of the relevant information to inform that decision.
This page will help you understand:
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Who are you?
This page is for senior leaders, operational directors, supply chain professionals, and transformation teams in mid-to-large organizations who are either:
- Experiencing persistent supply chain issues (e.g. poor service, high costs, excess inventory)
- Planning a major transformation or system implementation
- Looking to organize performance and drive sustainable, end-to-end improvements
- Exploring external support to help them future-proof their supply chain
You can use this page as a decision-making resource to understand whether your organization could benefit from external consulting support. It will help diagnose whether the challenges you’re facing warrant a structured improvement program, explain what working with a supply chain management consultant involves, and outline the outcomes they can expect.
Get in touch if you’d like to discuss your supply chain management challenges.
Common Challenges: When To Consider Supply Chain Consulting
Every organization’s supply chain faces hurdles at one time or another. But how do you know when outside help might be the catalyst you need to overcome these challenges? Here are some common red flags and pain points that indicate it may be time to consider supply chain consulting:
1. Excessive Inventory
Are your warehouses overflowing with stock you don’t need, while still somehow missing items you do need? Balancing inventory is one of the trickiest parts of supply chain management. If you consistently have too much capital tied up in inventory or find that you’re frequently obsoleting stock, it’s a sign of deeper issues in demand planning, forecasting, or supply chain design.
A consultant can help pinpoint why the mismatch is happening – and how to organize inventory levels so you free up cash without jeopardising service.
2. Ongoing Service Issues
Perhaps your customer service team is constantly firefighting – expediting late orders, apologising for delayed shipments, or handling complaints about product availability. If service performance is poor (low fill rates, late deliveries, inconsistent lead times), customers will notice and your reputation will suffer. Chronic service issues often stem from misaligned supply chain processes or inadequate planning.
Consultants like us can help diagnose the root causes – whether it’s a bottleneck in distribution, a supplier reliability problem, or disconnects between sales and operations – and then fix them to boost your service levels.
3. Lack of Responsiveness
In a dynamic market, the ability to respond quickly to change is paramount. Maybe you’re struggling to adapt to spikes in demand or sudden changes in customer preferences. By the time you ramp up production or reallocate stock, the opportunity has passed or customers have gone elsewhere. Or perhaps a disruption (like a port delay or a material shortage) catches your supply chain flat-footed and you can’t recover fast enough. If your supply chain feels sluggish and inflexible – always a step behind market shifts – then building agility is urgent.
We help design supply chain processes that are nimble and responsive, so you can react in days instead of weeks, and make proactive adjustments rather than reactive scrambles.
4. High Costs
Do you suspect that you’re spending more on your supply chain than you should? It could be freight costs creeping up, too much overtime in operations, high scrap or waste, or simply an overall cost-to-serve that makes certain products or customer segments unprofitable.
When costs are high but not clearly understood, or savings initiatives never seem to stick, an outside perspective can identify waste and inefficiencies that internal teams might overlook.
Our consultants analyze your cost drivers from end to end – transportation, warehousing, inventory holding, procurement spend – and highlight both quick wins and strategic changes to reduce cost without harming performance (in fact, usually while improving performance).
READ: The role of Supply Chain in the 21st century
5. Underutilbehaviord Technology
Many companies have invested in modern ERP systems, forecasting tools, or supply chain software, but aren’t fully using these tools’ capabilities. Perhaps the system is only being used for basic transactions but not for advanced analytics or “what-if” scenario planning. Or there might be features (like automated reorder signals, or collaboration portals for suppliers) that are left dormant. If you have technology sitting on the shelf, or your processes haven’t adapted to leverage new tools, you’re missing out on efficiency gains.
We often find quick improvements by aligning processes with existing technology and training your team to take advantage of those underused features. Sometimes it’s not about buying a new tool, but making sure you’re getting the most out of the ones you have.
6. Disjointed Supplier and Partner Relationships
Your supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and often those links extend outside your four walls. If you’re struggling with unreliable suppliers, frequent late deliveries from vendors, quality issues, or arm’s-length, confrontational relationships with supply chain partners, it’s a sign that better collaboration and supplier management practices are needed. Perhaps you don’t have good visibility into your suppliers’ operations or you’re not working together on forecasts and improvement plans.
Our experts can help implement supplier relationship management strategies – from segmentation of suppliers, to joint scorecards and development programs – to turn those relationships into true partnerships rather than constant battles.
DOWNLOAD our whitepaper - Supply Chain Design and Optimization: Outcompeting The Competition
7. Firefighting and Chaos
Lastly, a more general sign: if running your supply chain feels like constant firefighting – jumping from one crisis to the next (expediting this order, expediting that material, reworking schedules constantly) – then there’s likely a systemic issue at play.
The goal of good supply chain management is to be proactive and planned, not reactive and chaotic.
If you find that your team is always in “reaction mode,” struggling to stick to any plan, a consultant can help impose structure and forward planning, turning chaos into control.
If one or more of these challenges sound familiar, it’s probably time to seek external support. Supply chain consultants bring a fresh set of eyes and deep expertbehavior honed from working with many companies and industries.
What Does Supply Chain Management Consulting Include?
When you partner with a supply chain management consultant such as Oliver Wight, what exactly can you expect? Below, we break down the key elements of our consulting approach as an example of what you might expect from a supply chain management consultant generally, each of which plays a pivotal role in driving your supply chain improvement:
1. Diagnostic Assessment
Before you can transform your business, you need a clear view of where you stand today. That’s why every engagement begins with an assessment of your current operations – not a deep audit, but a practical, collaborative process. Through informal conversations and a structured review of your processes, metrics and ways of working, we build a shared understanding of your challenges and opportunities. The result is a focused feedback report that sets out what needs to change – and why – to achieve your desired outcomes.
2. Benchmarking
Following the initial assessment, we work with you to build a robust business case for transformation. This involves analysing how current performance affects key areas of your profit and loss – from service levels and working capital to cost-to-serve. Using insights from our extensive industry database, we help quantify the financial opportunity and identify where improvements will deliver the greatest value. This evidence-led approach ensures any change is rooted in commercial logic and targeted at the underlying causes of underperformance.
3. Leadership engagement
Lasting transformation starts at the top. That’s why every engagement must be supported by the relevant C-suite leaders. It’s not just about operational change. Ooften, it’s a shift in leadership focus that unlocks new behaviors, mindsets and ways of working across the organization. We ensure senior decision-makers are fully aligned on the case for change, the desired outcomes, and the role they play in making it happen. Without this shared understanding and commitment, even the best plans struggle to gain traction.
3. Designing the improvement program
With a clear understanding of your current performance and challenges, we co-create a tailored improvement program designed to deliver the business outcomes you’re targeting – whether that’s enhanced service, reduced costs, improved working capital, or greater agility. This may involve redesigning elements of your end-to-end supply chain planning model, enhancing integration across functions, or introducing new planning disciplines that enable better, faster decisions. Every recommendation is grounded in your business context and focused on unlocking measurable value.
4. Coaching and Change Management
Sustainable performance improvement depends on more than just new processes or systems – it relies on people adopting new ways of working. That’s why we embed coaching and change leadership into every engagement. We work shoulder to shoulder with your teams to ensure improvements are understood, embraced and sustained. Whether the focus is on supply chain planning, decision-making behaviors, or cross-functional collaboration, we support your people to build the confidence, capability and commitment needed to drive lasting business improvement.
5. Risk Management
In a world where disruption is the new normal, effective risk management in the supply chain is non-negotiable. Part of our consulting involves assessing your supply chain risks and fortifying your operation against them. Consultants will examine potential vulnerabilities, such as over-reliance on a single supplier, lack of backup transport options, geopolitical risks in your sourcing regions, demand surges outstripping capacity, or even risks like cybersecurity in a digitally connected chain. Once they identify the weak links, they will work with you to develop mitigation strategies and contingency plans.
6. Innovation and organization
Our consulting doesn’t just fix current problems – it also looks to the future through innovation and ongoing organization. We encourage a mindset of continuous improvement long after the initial project. As part of the engagement, we’ll introduce mechanisms for your team to keep innovating and organizing the supply chain. This might involve setting up an internal continuous improvement team or process, identifying key metrics to watch and improve quarter by quarter, and exploring how emerging technologies could play a role in your operations.
7. Action Planning
After the diagnostics and design phases, one of our key deliverables is a clear, actionable roadmap for improvement. This action plan is essentially your supply chain transformation game plan. It lays out the initiatives to be undertaken (both quick wins and longer-term strategic changes), complete with priorities, timelines, resource requirements, and expected outcomes. Consultants will scope this plan in close collaboration with you, ensuring it’s realistic given your constraints but also ambitious enough to drive significant improvement.
The Benefits of Effective Supply Chain Management
Why invest the time and effort to improve your supply chain? What payoff can you expect? Effective supply chain management – when done right – delivers a wealth of benefits that resonate throughout the organization. Here are some of the key advantages you can look forward to as you strengthen your supply chain:
- Strategic alignment: A well-managed supply chain is aligned with your business’s strategic goals.
- Reduced cost-to-serve: One very tangible benefit is cost reduction – specifically, lowering the cost-to-serve your customers.
- Improved order fulfilment and service levels: Customers feel the difference when a supply chain is firing on all cylinders. You’ll see improved order fulfilment metrics – higher on-time delivery rates, higher order completeness (no backorders or missing items), and faster delivery times.
- Greater agility and responsiveness.
- Smarter resource allocation and investment decisions.
- Stronger collaboration - internally and externally.
- Market differentiation and growth: Lastly, it’s worth noting that an excellent supply chain can become a selling point and a growth driver.
It’s often said that “supply chains compete, not companies,” meaning that in a hyper-competitive world, the company with the superior supply chain often wins. We wholeheartedly agree. By investing in your supply chain capabilities, you’re investing in the long-term success and competitiveness of your business.
Get in touch if you’d like to discuss your supply chain management challenges.
Supply Chain Maturity: Where Are You Now?
Improving your supply chain is a journey – and like any journey, it helps to know your starting point. This is where the Oliver Wight Maturity Model comes in. Our maturity model characterizes an organization’s supply chain (and related processes) as being in one of four key phases of maturity. Understanding which phase you’re in now can illuminate what steps to take next to progress. The phases from basic to advanced are:
- Phase 1: Co-ordination
- At this stage, the business is working to establish basic control. Processes are inconsistent and reactive, with performance often reliant on individual effort. Activity is typically focused on responding to issues as they arise, rather than on proactive planning or structured improvement.
- Phase 2: Business Process Control
- Standard processes and controls are introduced to bring greater consistency and reliability. The business begins to shift from reactive ways of working to more repeatable and predictable performance, using procedures and performance measures to reduce errors and improve outcomes.
- Phase 3: Automation
- Routine activities are automated to reduce manual effort and improve data accuracy. Systems are in place to support business processes, allowing teams to spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time focusing on areas that add value and support improvement.
- Phase 4: Integration
- The business operates as a fully integrated system, with functions working together in a coordinated and aligned way. Information flows across departments and partners, supporting shared decision-making. The supply chain is aligned with business strategy, and performance reflects a mature, high-performing organization.
Most organizations fall somewhere on this spectrum. Each step-up brings greater control, efficiency, and agility – but reaching full integration takes time and sustained effort.
Use our free online self-assessment tool today!
Our Approach: Why Choose Oliver Wight?
There are many consultants out there – so what makes Oliver Wight’s approach unique? We believe it comes down to a few core principles and values in the way we work with our clients:
- Knowledge transfer to empower your team
- Sustainable change, not flavor-of-the-month
- Proven maturity model and Class A certification
- Creative yet practical
- Holistic, end-to-end perspective
When you choose Oliver Wight, you’re choosing a partner with a 55+ year legacy of transforming some of the world’s leading organizations. We measure our success by your success – meaning the results you achieve and the capabilities you build. Our approach is collaborative; we become an extension of your team. And our satisfaction comes from seeing you reach a point where you no longer need us because you’ve achieved self-sufficiency in running an excellent supply chain process. That is our ultimate goal.
Find out more about our Supply Chain Management Consulting Services
