Creating a supply chain for the future

For us who works with and around supply chains the necessity of resilient and agile supply chains for commerce, stable growth, and competitiveness. And if there is a silver lining of the last few years of crises and disruptions, is that the rest of the world finally has come up to speed of its importance.

While global pandemics may not be the norm, disruptions will always occur. Whether it’s natural disasters, resource shortages, conflicts or other unforeseeable events supply chain organizations must be prepared to limit the impact to their flows.

In a recent article, Gartner presents four main supply chain organizational priorities for 2022.

Commercial Growth

Firstly, commercial growth has unfortunate fallen on the backburner for many supply chain intensive companies. While it’s on the top three most important strategic business priorities, only a third of organizations drive for growth. According to Gartner, the supply chain needs to pivot to a customer-centric function where it can use data to sense and predict customers needs and wants. Doing this will allow offering customers innovative supply-chain-specific solutions for optimized profit and growth.

Substainability

Environmental and social responsibility has become more and more important for customers. And companies are adhering to pressures by making public commitments related to sustainability, ethical practices, data privacy to just name a few. But making your company between your four walls responsible and sustainable will not be enough. Customers will and are broadening their social and environmental expectations to apply to the entire product life cycle. This means that organizations need to push for transparency throughout the supply chain and adapt sustainability metrics both up and down the production chain.

Data analytics

Information, or data, has always been one of the cornerstones of a well-functioning supply chain. Using real-time data for real-time analytics and then smarter decision-making are vital for key processes such as inventory optimization and automated execution planning.

The recommendation is to early invest in supply chain technology to enable real-time analytics followed by real-time decision-making. The focus should be on gaining end-to-end visibility, data processing and finally end-to-end automated execution.

Where in the AI/Machine learning journey are you?

The flexible workplace

The final insight from Gartner focuses on something that often is overlooked, the human work experience. The need for high-value talent for supply chain organization has been highlighted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Just as a supply chain needs to be agile and flexible, so must the workforce.  Organizations need to enable flexibility of where and when works gets done, and focues their measurement success on outcomes. Furthermore, according to a Gartner study are 44% worker experiencing less fatigue and 45% an increased intent to stay at their current employment due to a flexible “Human-centric work design”, compared to a “Office centric work design”.

Managers and CSCOs should embrace organizational workplace flexibility and invest in social connectivity and collaboration to enable purpose driven work and spur innovation. Technological investments will make improve daily operations and bridge the difference in physical and digital processes.

Take your first steps towards supply chain digitalization