How do businesses prepare for uncertainty? If Covid – 19 has taught us one thing, it is that supply chains can be fragile and that to ride the waves of change and unforeseen events, businesses need to be more agile. But the challenge facing many organisations is where to make the changes and what to prioritise.
The proliferation of data should be a blessing to businesses. It is the raw material for getting insight into personnel and asset performance, processeses, buying habits and other outside factors that could impact the business. But that’s all it is, a raw material. It needs intelligent analytics and modelling to add real value, to understand how it can help organisations work out the possible impact of problems in the supply chain and where automation may or may not help in solving them.
But this is not just about dealing with possible disasters. This is about the ongoing digital trans- formation of supply chains and understanding where and how they can be more effective. Automation is already changing how some people work and, as a result, how some supply chains operate. What this means is that supply chain teams can build a credible plan to add greater value to the business by being more strategic and tactical.
The goal is to create a mature, dynamic supply chain that doesn’t stutter and stumble reacting solely to market and economic bumps in the road. By unifying processes, people and systems of data, it is possible to build a mature and resilient supply chain capable of driving the efficient delivery of products and services.
The key to this is planning. The more data, the more automation, the better the planning and the more agile and efficient the business and its supply chain. It’s about turning available data into information that can enable fast, informed decision making to ensure great outcomes for businesses and their people. And as with any change, it will require diligence, dependability and determination.
In many ways, Covid-19 has been an opportunity for organisations to realise their futures and what it takes to ensure long-term viability. Resilience, in more ways than one, has become the watch- word of 2020 and beyond.
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