How Resilient is Your Supply Chain?

Have you ever asked yourself one of the below questions?

• Do I know what our supply chain looks like, who our suppliers are, or who their partners are?
• Do I see any gaps in our supply chain, and can I quantify them?
• Do I have a "plan B" to ensure product flow if disruption strikes?

If you answered?NO?to at least one of those questions, then it is time to validate the supply chain and prepare. The next disruptive event may be right around the corner.

There are many avenues to achieve readiness. Our focus is to leverage supply chain data to empower agile decision-making by:

• Elevating business analytics capabilities
• Designing in flexibility

Elevate Business Analytics Capabilities

Elevating analytics?is a necessary step to move beyond using static spreadsheets and hoping to only understand what happened (descriptive analytics) and why (diagnostic analytics). Today’s tools and analytics skills provide insight and intelligence by predicting the performance of specific supply chain designs and finding the best course of action for a given situation. However, a supply chain rarely operates without variability. A best practice is to supplement the optimal design solution with simulations of different operating conditions to assess how robust or fragile the design is (prescriptive analytics).

Design in Flexibility

Flexibility trumps redundancy, yet both have roles to play in achieving higher levels of agility and resiliency. Part of being resilient is being efficient. It is about the speed at which a company recovers from a disruption or shock. Flexibility is a process, but it is also about structure (aka design).?Deploy flexibility across all functions of the supply chain.

• Inventory – Safety stock policy and where goods are positioned
• Supply - Reserve capacity is sourced and secured
• Demand - Shaping and customer segmentation
• Fulfillment – Allocation and postponement strategies
• Manufacturing – Geographic diversity of manufacturing sites and products they produce
• Distribution Network – Multiple locations and reserve capacity with 3PLs
• Transportation - Multi-port flow strategy and reserve capacity with 3PLs

Achieving a resilient supply chain is an enterprise-wide effort and one that will transform your company. It is not easy to implement, but given the volatility of ecosystems and a series of compounding risks – it is truly a business imperative!

Interested in learning more about supply chain resiliency? Read the full article.

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