Optimize supply chain efficiency: the hidden levers you’re missing

Operating supply chains in today’s environment requires your procurement team to maintain efficiency, resilience, and responsible purchasing while sticking to a budget. In addition to these pressures, they also face potential for widespread supply chain disruptions, such as pandemics, strict sustainability regulations, or trade volatility. When you combine all these moving parts, your team is juggling a complicated procurement network.

But managing these many factors of your network effectively is possible when your team has a strategic supply chain approach that boosts resilience while preserving compliance, cost control, and agility. With the help of data-driven strategies and agile digital solutions, your team can transform procurement into a key growth driver for your organization.

What is supply chain efficiency in 2026?

Supply chain efficiency is an optimized process that moves goods from their starting point to the consumer as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. Historically, an efficient supply chain meant focusing solely on cost and speed. But as modern procurement teams face more complicated supply chains, they must expand their strategy to include visibility, sustainability, and resilience.​

One of the simplest ways to achieve and maintain supply chain visibility is with comprehensive and reliable data. In early 2025, the Office of the United States Trade Representation published six policy papers that emphasized this need for high-quality data to boost supply chain resilience. However, too often limited or outdated data sources constrain a procurement team’s ability to do so. Because of this, it’s crucial your team maintain comprehensive insight into their supply chain with trustworthy data, and they can achieve this with advanced procurement technology.

Why efficiency must coexist with resilience

An efficient supply chain is quick, cost-effective, and controlled. However, without a resilience strategy, it remains vulnerable to disruptions. For example, a lean inventory approach may show huge cost savings on paper, but if your supplier hits a barrier and can’t deliver, you won’t have backup vendors or inventory levels to sustain your business until that supplier resolves the issue. Your operations may come to a standstill as a result.

This is why procurement teams are devising modern supply chain strategies that include operational agility and redundancy. These characteristics support your team in balancing efficiency and resilience with diversified sourcing and data-driven insights for smarter supply chain management.

Common barriers to supply chain efficiency

A successful supply chain efficiency strategy resolves your current challenges and sets up your operations for long-term prosperity. Naming your operational barriers is a key first step when developing your approach. Below are common barriers that procurement teams of all sizes may face, along with tips for how to navigate them:

Fragmented supplier networks

A scattered supplier network can lead to siloed supplier and warehousing data, which limits supply chain visibility. Without insights to manage factors like monitoring supplier performance, maintaining reliable partnerships, and staying ahead of possible disruptions, your team may encounter workflow bottlenecks.

Vendor consolidation and category-based sourcing can address this issue. Vendor consolidation reduces the number of primary suppliers in your network to tighten operations, boost visibility, and increase control. Category-based sourcing, on the other hand, groups goods or services from a single or small set of suppliers to streamline operations and lower your total risk. These approaches help you shrink your supplier network to save money and improve manageability.

Poor spend visibility and manual purchasing

Spend visibility means knowing where your organization allocates each procurement dollar to build accurate budgets and cost efficiency. However, traditional manual purchasing increases the risk of misplacing important documents, document inaccuracies that create delays, and buying policy violations, all of which result in poor spend visibility. 

Automating manual workflows is the first step to improving financial visibility. Work with your team to identify opportunities for robust systems integrations that create a unified data analytics dashboard. With all your spend data in one place, it’s easier to gain insight into which parts of your operations see the most delay or issues. From there, you can layer in automations to eliminate manual purchasing barriers while improving visibility. With a well-managed purchasing process and reliable spending insight, it’s easier to craft an effective supply chain strategy.

Lack of alignment across departments

Unified operations is the first step toward achieving supply chain efficiency. But if your procurement, finance, and operations teams are misaligned, a cohesive workflow can only get you so far. You may see an increased risk of process bottlenecks, costly data inaccuracies, delays, or purchasing compliance violations that make your supply chain efficiency goals difficult to accomplish.

You can encourage your entire organization to work together by introducing a procurement governance model. It should consist of standardized processes, policies, and procedures that determine how a procurement workflow functions for all teams.

An example of governance at work is centralizing your purchasing process. By managing this workflow in one place, it’s easier for internal teams to make decisions using the same information, follow compliant workflows, and remain aligned on goals. You can opt for a single process or a more flexible hybrid model wherein buyers purchase on their own from pre-approved vendors—yet do so within a standardized purchasing workflow. By building a cohesive, centralized governance model, you can foster organization-wide alignment.

Key metrics to measure supply chain efficiency

To get leadership buy-in, you need to show results. That means selecting measurable metrics, tracking them, and demonstrating a return on investment. 

The following is a roundup of essential quantifiable indicators that you can use to prove the success of your supply chain efficiency strategy:

Perfect order index

Perfect order index (POI) measures how frequently an order completes its procurement lifecycle without interruptions, complications, or errors. A high POI requires accuracy and efficiency throughout every fulfillment stage. The stronger your POI, the more resilient your supply chain.

Inventory turnover ratio

Inventory turnover ratio (ITR) tracks the rate at which goods enter and leave your organization. A high ratio means you have stronger sales and effective inventory management. It’s a useful metric for optimizing cost management by maximizing inventory use so you can avoid stockouts and lower overall spending.

ITR helps with demand forecasting and implementing strategies like just-in-time ordering. You can also use this metric to guide how you work with suppliers to optimize recurring reorder timing. 

Supplier lead time and reliability

Supplier lead time is the amount of time between when you place an order and its arrival. It assesses a supplier’s reliability by tracking their on-time delivery rates and reveals weak links or potential risk areas in your network. 

You would use lead time to identify suppliers that often deliver late or have interruptions in their network that cause a ripple effect in your operations. This insight helps you decide which suppliers are reliable and which pose too significant a risk.

Procurement cycle time

Procurement cycle time is how long it takes for one order to complete the entire procurement process. It begins the moment you identify a need for a good or service and concludes when you pay the vendor invoice. 

This KPI is useful for demonstrating the impact of your strategy to eliminate inefficiencies from your supply chain. A relatively short and consistent procurement cycle time indicates efficient supply chain management as it avoids delays, bottlenecks, or costly errors.

Spend under management

Spend under management (SUM) is the percentage of your organization’s spending that your procurement process and team manages. With a higher SUM percentage, your organization can operate more efficiently because your team can access the resources they need to build an effective and resilient supply chain. 

Generally, SUM metrics demonstrate procurement maturity, and a satisfactory percentage can signal that your organization is ready to adopt a platform to elevate your workflows.

Strategies to improve supply chain efficiency

A supply chain efficiency strategy should fit your organization’s needs and resolve pain points. The following techniques help your team boost efficiency for your supply chain overall but are flexible enough to scale as your organization grows. 

Centralize supplier management

Centralizing your supplier management data gives you a real-time, reliable view of your suppliers, including what you order from each and when and their performance metrics. You can then use this data to find key opportunities to consolidate orders or prioritize high-performing vendors that maintain timely delivery. 

With supplier data in one place, you get a bird’s-eye and line-item perspective, so you can more effectively manage your network and maintain operational efficiency.

Automate routine procurement workflows

When evaluating which parts of the process would benefit from automation, you’re looking for critical routine tasks that always follow the same process. These are steps where minor errors can result in massive delays, invoicing errors, or purchasing policy violations. 

Amazon Business offers automated tools that help streamline business buying such as purposeful integrations, flexible payment options, and customizable reporting to improve compliance and deepen spend visibility. It supports automated approval workflows and recurring reorder management, all backed by Amazon’s world-class fulfillment network. Our smart business buying solution helps simplify your procurement process so your team can focus on building innovative strategies that drive profit and efficiency.

Enhance visibility with analytics and forecasting

Data provides concrete insight into your supply chain’s effectiveness. To get the most benefit from these procurement analytics, you need to organize the data in a readable format.

Amazon Business offers deeper insight into your spend with Amazon Business Analytics. Customizable dashboards offer spend tracking and trends analysis so you can be sure buyers are adhering to purchasing policies. Business Prime members can access more insights through Spend Visibility, including compliance issues, find savings opportunities, manage KPIs, and track trends—from any device. 

Strengthen collaboration between procurement and operations

It’s important that every stakeholder knows organizational goals and procurement systems. To achieve this, build supply chain transparency into your procurement operations through shared analytics dashboards, clearly defined workflows, and combined reporting. These factors increase the success of your supply chain efficiency strategy by creating alignment. 

But even with the right workflows, you still need to check in occasionally. Your team should conduct regular spend reviews and hold supplier performance meetings to maintain alignment and ensure your stakeholders feel heard, predict potential challenges, and maintain efficiency.

Balance cost savings with responsible purchasing

Supply chain operational costs and responsible purchasing goals are closely linked. Cost-saving efforts like consolidating orders or optimizing reorder timing can result in your organization using less packaging and your suppliers spending less time on the roads to deliver your orders. Both outcomes help lower your environmental impact. 

Cost saving opportunities within responsible purchasing mandates extend to include your supplier’s procurement habits. It’s easier to monitor vendor sustainability practices when you source from and track a handful of vendors. Fewer suppliers means you have less data points and supply chains to monitor and a key part of your ability to accomplish this is finding the right vendors for your network, and Amazon Business can help. 

With Amazon Business’ Diversity Certifications Policies, you encourage buyers to purchase from suppliers that align with your responsible purchasing goals. Buyers see a tag on suppliers that have a local, organic, or another sustainability certification, which makes it easier to find suppliers that are a good fit for your organization to support long-term cost savings and more sustainable procurement practices.

Invest in procurement capabilities and culture

Long-term supply chain efficiency requires you to invest in the strategies, systems, and culture that make it possible. This means adopting high-quality analytics dashboards that enhance visibility and uncover key opportunities to consolidate, prioritize, and strategize your vendor partnerships and supply chain. 

At the same time that you’re adopting and implementing these new systems, it’s best practice to foster a culture of organization-wide collaboration and transparency. The effectiveness of any strategy or new solution hinges on your team welcoming it into your daily work. You should loop in stakeholders early in the implementation process, seek their feedback, and build systems that meet their needs. 

How procurement tools accelerate efficiency

Amazon Business can help your team streamline your business buying operations. With business-relevant selection, innovative tools and features, and the convenience and value of Amazon, here are some ways you can simplify buying to drive toward their next stage of growth:

Integration with existing systems

Integrations are the surest way to build a unified procurement network where all your systems connect seamlessly. Amazon Business integrates with over 300 procurement and ERP systems, saving your team time, reducing operational friction, and facilitating data accuracy by removing siloes and increasing visibility. 

For your long-term goals, integrated systems foster scalability by granting your operations flexibility and insight. Amazon Business helps procurement teams achieve scalability by prioritizing agile functionality, adjusting to your needs as they change with business growth.

Compliance and control with buying policies

Built-in visibility and control measures mean digital procurement solutions simplify purchasing compliance without getting in the way of your buyers. For example, Amazon Business’ Guided Buying tools help you set spend limits and create purchasing policies that encourage buyers to order from preferred vendors and steer clear of restricted ones. These measures lower maverick spend and support compliant purchasing processes.

Insights through reporting dashboards

Once you have spend limits in place and reporting dashboards ready to collect and organize procurement data, your team will be able to access key insights. Amazon Business’ Spend Visibility helps you track how your team spends each dollar and spot opportunities to consolidate vendors or orders for a more efficient supply chain.

You can consolidate spend data within a robust dashboard to further streamline supplier performance tracking—insights into spending, supplier performance, and purchasing workflows can inform smarter budgeting, supply chain optimization, and supplier partnerships.

Build a smarter, more resilient supply chain

Building a smarter, more efficient, and more resilient supply chain is no longer about simply cutting costs. As supply chains and supplier partnerships grow more complex, maintaining supply chain efficiency relies on organizational alignment, real-time analytics, and operational agility. It’s easier for your team to manage these parts of your supply chain with unified procurement operations.

From spend insights to automation to AI innovations, Amazon Business supports procurement teams of varying sizes and industries in their efforts to achieve operational efficiency. If your organization is ready to discover the benefits of a smart business buying solution, contact Amazon Business today to learn more.