Cultivating Relentless Supply Chain Agility at IBM

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the January-February 2022 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

January-February 2022

Well, that’s over, and aren’t we all glad to put 2020 in the rear-view mirror? For a minute, however, let’s look at a silver lining, because I think there is one for supply chain managers. That’s because the pandemic put supply chain in the spotlight like never before—and, with the approval of a vaccine just a few weeks ago in December, supply chain and cold chain are back in the news… While sales usually gets all the attention, maybe 2021 is our time to shine.” That’s the beginning of the column I wrote for the January 2021 issue, and maybe I was a little too pollyannish.

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IBM, one of the world’s best-known technology companies, runs a complex global supply chain with strategic manufacturing facilities located around the world and workers spread across more than 40 countries to support customers in more than 170 countries. To meet the high configuration product demand, the IBM Supply Chain (IBM SC) operates in a hybrid model of build-to-plan and build-to-order. IBM also collaborates with many hundreds of suppliers across its global, multi-tier supplier network.

Over the past decade, IBM has exhibited a relentless commitment to building smarter supply chains to quickly and effectively navigate global disruptions. The focus has been on building a cognitive supply chain that embraces an agile culture of innovation, invests in team members’ growth and engagement, focuses on clients’ needs and successes and leverages exponential technologies to deliver greater value.

Emphasis on the term agile culture of innovation. In today’s increasingly competitive and turbulent business environment, agility has been widely recognized as one of the fundamental characteristics of forward-looking supply chains that could render positive impacts on financial, market and operational performance. Recently, as companies try to deal with the unprecedented and volatile changes in both demand and supply due to the COVID-19 pandemic, focused attention toward supply chain agility (SCA) is accelerating.

However, there remains a great deal of confusion around the concept of agility. In discussing SCA with various companies, we often ask them to self-evaluate their current level of agility. A typical response is: “We’re very agile. When a situation comes up for an unanticipated customer demand or a supply disruption, we do whatever it takes to satisfy the customer.” Frequently accompanying such a response are heroic stories of how significant the additional efforts and resources are expended to meet those needs. It is apparent from these conversations that what is thought of as agility is in reality heady reactive problem solving, and there remains a confusion between successful fire-fighting capability and what true agility really means.

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