Knowledge is the result of understanding and interpreting the data that will continue to amass around us in the years to come. How powerful would it be if we could know exactly what was happening at every moment, in every link, on ever supply chain, from the purchasing of raw materials to the end customer taking ownership? Today it would certainly be pretty powerful, but soon it will merely be the norm. Executive’s time will now be focused solely on the critical high-level decisions that need their expertise and which will define their operation’s competitive advantage. There will be no need to hold inventory buffers to cushion against adversity, options will be predicted for them in real time with pre-calculated outcomes for each scenario, based on detailed data analyses. Soon every technologically equipped organization on our supply chain will be able to sense and respond to issues and disruption like never before. There is a host of new innovations already in development that will soon enable them to extend their visibility along the digitized supply network with a massive expansion of ‘right time’ information. The question we have to ask ourselves is how far our own organization has travelled on its transformation journey to embrace it? Fundamentally, supply chains are already going digital with faster interactions and automated decision-making for more and more routine activities (especially regulatory and administrative). It’s a concept we’re all only too familiar with. Resilient operations of the future will, therefore, need to increase their visibility further down their supply chains, recognize and interpret what they see more quickly, then be ready to pivot and adapt instinctively to change as it happens.Įssential themes the pandemic has emphasized Data is king There, we might detect an over-reliance on, say, a critical component supplier or raw material that is potentially vulnerable and, because supply-chain vulnerabilities multiply with their complexity, the knock-on effects can disrupt assembly lines far and wide and cause potential losses for every irresilient link forward in the chain. However, with the increased complexity and global scale of modern supply chains, building resilience will mean going beyond any potential impact caused by direct customers or suppliers to look three or four links down the supply chain. Given that the disruption that caused these supply chain failures seems likely to become a more common feature of global business, an investment in building operational resilience looks increasingly vital. This resilience would entail developing the agility to sense, respond and recover quickly. This is likely to dwarf the cost of building-in the resilience to adapt to such eventualities. Since the pandemic struck, we have come to appreciate the potentially crippling cost of being the victim of failed supply chain. So, the additional expense of building-in resilience against eventualities that might never happen have, until recently, looked like a cost worth saving for many organizations. Modern supply chains are carefully optimized to maximize cost efficiency. But recent events have exposed their vulnerability to unplanned change.
Supply Chains have evolved into complex, highly-tuned globalized systems. Essential themes the pandemic has emphasized
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