How to make rapid and right decisions during a supply chain disaster

The recent explosions in Tianjin China have been devastating, killing at least 114 people and injuring hundreds.Beyond the dreadful loss of life, the explosions also demonstrated how unplanned events can disrupt commercial supply chains. A recent article in Automotive Logistics highlighted the effect of the 10,000 vehicles destroyed during the event on the automotive industry. All car manufacturers concerned are trying to assess the damage to their vehicles, identify which customer orders are affected, and evaluate the alternative supply possibilities and their related costs.

Is your supply chain ready for a disaster?

Hopefully, you wouldn’t have to face an event with such tragic scale. But can your supply chain withstand a drastic disrupt? Are you able to immediately view the impact on your supply chain and assess the exact inventory at impacted site(s)? Following a disaster, would you be able to efficiently assess various options to ensure your supply chain continues to operate with minimal disruption at the lowest possible cost?

The key to answering these questions is whether you have the right information at your fingertips and can immediately calculate the impact of events across your supply chain. Once an event occurs, companies typically form a disaster recovery team, which starts to analyze the situation. Such teams face several key data challenges, which include:

Timely, in-depth data availability:

Because data is often scatted across several systems it may take days or weeks to gather the necessary data required to accurately assess the impact.

Calculation Power:

Calculating the impact across the entire supply chain of a node that is non operable and simulating whether other nodes can handle the extra capacity, transport, raw materials and finished goods is not an easy feat to calculate. This in itself could take days or weeks without the proper tools. However in this urgent situation we need these calculations to be done in seconds rather than days.

Real-time risk management in supply chains

Companies will need a tool that can provides a powerful and flexible approach, allowing teams to make more informed supply chain risk management decisions. With a permanent real-time monitoring of supply chain risks, teams can swiftly react to incidents, make informed decision and achieve the desired supply chain resilience needed following a disaster.

This would be enabled through several key capabilities:

• Real-time access to data stored in multiple systems across your supply chain network.
• Geospatial analysis, which provides users with a visual analysis of various impacts, such as costs, lead times, product availability, order fulfillment rates, when a disastrous event affects a warehouse or production location.
• Alerts that pinpoint the attention to the specific supply chain areas impacted by an unplanned event.
• On-the-fly simulations that enable examining alternative courses of action following a disaster, assessing their impact on different supply chain nodes and selecting the most appropriate response.

To read the original blog post