The pandemic has impacted the global supply chain in a very significant way. It has ultimately uncovered the fragility of the way that companies had built, shipped, delivered, and sold their products. The irony of this impact is that the marketing engine that drives consumer demand used to be the limiting factor to the sales cycle. Companies spent time and effort designing a product that would meet the needs of their target consumers, followed by marketing campaigns to increase awareness and ultimately purchasing decisions. Now, that demand has outstripped the capacity to supply the products to their customers.
It Takes an Ecosystem
Building visibility into this overall digital supply chain process is the starting point to embedding resilience. A single “tool” may provide a portion of the solution, but it will likely require an ecosystem of components to not only create a dashboard about the current state of the supply chain, but also engage the capability to act based on parameters like supplier availability, material pricing, delivery scheduling, weather patterns, distribution capacity, or sales and marketing activities. This ecosystem requires planning to achieve the greatest benefit, but organizations who involve an intelligent automation platform can realistically build a digital supply chain solution across the entire company.
Building Outcomes not Organizations
While forecasting demand has always been and art, there is a need for additional insight into increasing the resilience of the supply chain from manufacturing to delivery of the finished goods. Unfortunately, many companies don’t view the supply chain beyond the transportation of their products between factory, distribution, and retail locations. While this is part of the chain, it misses the broader view. Supply chain isn’t managed by a single department within the organization. An organizational view of the supply chain includes executive vision, product planning, marketing and sales, product design, procurement, marketing, information technology, logistics (transportation, warehousing, distribution), customer services, legal (licensing management, contracts, liability). Because of this broader impact, it’s imperative that businesses engage a higher-level view on managing their supply chain.
Management needs to drive transformative thinking. Digital supply chain transformation emphasizes the value of flattening the management layers and the number of managers within the process. With flatter hierarchies, management teams should have a greater range of control with a fundamentally changed organizational role. Managers become consultants, advisors, and coaches, instead of supervisors and controllers. Employees engage intelligent automation to target outcomes for the business. As processes cross functional boundaries, traditional departmental structures become outdated. Instead, people will be organized into multidisciplinary teams with intelligent automation administering the information management tasks according to the rules defined by the teams. These teams can replace the functional structure, where each member of the process team has "shared accountability for process outcomes."
When the outcomes are in jeopardy, team members have the information through the digital supply chain that they need to quickly reassess and create alternate plans. These plans may include backing off on marketing, changing suppliers, increasing inventories, or shifting their locations. Because the intelligent automation platform has connections to the various systems, both internally as well with suppliers and partners, alternates can be mapped out quickly to provide solutions to the business.
The pandemic has exposed the challenges with managing supply chain disruptions, but it’s not too late for organizations to start building an intelligent automation solution that can navigate future uncertainty. While this will vary by geography, industry and company maturity, it’s important to start now and drive adoption that will produce the outcomes that the business needs.
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