How COVID-19 Made Us Rethink and Reimagine Our Supply Chain Strategy
The COVID-19 pandemic has adversely affected the global supply chain on both the demand & supply side, increasing the supplier risk, revenue leakage, SCM visibility challenges, demand vs. supply matching, and customer behavior change which affected buying patterns with logistics challenges occurred due to lockdown and social distancing.
The Pandemic has taught most companies across the globe that no strategy is permanent and made them rethink and reimagine on how to build tradeoffs between risk and growth.
Hence efficient Supply chain is key to the running of profitable enterprises COVID-19 has forced most Companies and businesses to take a hard look at the collective supply chain data and realize the obvious. Many were predominantly dependent on a single country as a source of supply, and there was excessive dependence on the model.
The pause of COVID-19 exposed the weaknesses, and many competing firms were left wondering on the very basis of their competition if all products were manufactured in the same place.
Before the pandemic, the major focus of big and medium size conglomerates was to contain costs with high customer satisfaction, but very few of them realistically worked on Supply Chain Risk and mitigants.
The COVID-19 pandemic has taught us how a robust and efficient supply chain can create a positive impact on the performance of the business. Hence to mitigate such challenges, global firms have to start investing in blockchain, artificial intelligence, and advanced warning systems that will help highlight the pain points. These pain points could be over-dependence on a single region or supplier, pricing pressures, transportation bottlenecks, and even quality issues. This visibility will help firms resist shocks that can derail business completely.
Next-generation digital solutions are now becoming an immediacy to deal with future issues. They are being built to adapt and work in situations that are yet to be predicted.
