Simplify work to unlock supply chain’s potential in uncertain times

By Lorraine Gavin, senior principal analyst, Gartner Supply Chain

In today's climate of economic uncertainty, with ongoing tariff volatility and fragile consumer confidence, organizations are increasingly focused on maximizing the potential of their current workforce.

When it comes to getting work done, supply chains can have a reputation for focusing on process and operations—a mindset that has advantages and disadvantages. This tendency ensures consistency and can drive efficiency, but employees often stick to familiar processes because of entrenched thought processes, even when no longer effective. From there, there is the temptation to add more processes and guidelines to improve how work gets done—and then the workforce is celebrated for completing “hard” work.

Eighty percent of supply chain organizations primarily reward hard work, instead of reducing the requirement for it, according to Gartner research. This practice leads 44% of employees to regularly work around formal processes to get work done.

Instead of rewarding hard work, supply chain leaders need to examine how work is accomplished and how to improve that work’s effectiveness. The goal is to not simply be efficient in current ways of working if these approaches are unproductive, but to make work easier, creating capacity and increasing productivity. This can be accomplished by prioritizing the following steps.

1. Encourage employee-led process simplification

Changes imposed from the top without adequate understanding of operational realities can inadvertently exacerbate problems. Leaders often perceive workflow transformations as beneficial, while employees experience them differently, underscoring the importance of employee involvement in these processes.

We have seen this with adoption of GenAI tools in supply chain, where productivity for individual, desk-based workers is not translating to greater team-level productivity. Additionally, the deployment of GenAI tools is increasing anxiety among many employees, providing a dampening effect on their productivity and creating new complications for organizations.

To gain greater employee input and avoid increasing workplace friction, leaders should engage employees in simplification workshops. Pose questions like: “What can we stop doing?” and “Where are we spending too much time on high-effort, low-impact work?”

While leaders may fear delegation and loss of control, the goal is to engage employees and give them a voice rather than fully delegating workflow simplification tasks. Employees should be empowered to challenge entrenched practices and highlight inefficiencies.

We’ve seen this accomplished at one company that implemented so-called “assumption-busting” sprints. In its previous attempts to source suggestions for process improvements, the company found that its employees held off making suggestions for fear they would make processes nonfunctional by cutting too many steps. Stakeholders and peers compounded this with a “this is what we do around here” attitude, believing that processes exist for a reason.

This mentality was challenged by conducting week-long “assumption-busting” sprints—workshops that asked a cross-functional, cross-sectional team to identify all the assumptions supporting the current ways of completing certain processes. This reversed the typical burden of proof for process redesign by empowering employees, allowing the sprint team to build completely new and agile processes based on bare-minimum requirements.

2. Establish and communicate unified objectives

Redesigning work in isolation can solve problems for one team while creating issues for another. Effective simplification requires collaboration across functions to ensure improvements do not increase work friction elsewhere. Leaders should foster transparency and shared solutioning, enhancing collaboration and awareness of the broader impacts of decisions.

Supply chain leaders need to view simplification as a team sport—we may not see problems we’re close to, while to others they may be obvious. To achieve effective cross-functional simplification, organizations need to establish transparency of roles and the interconnection of work across the supply chain that goes beyond siloed decision-making. Shared solutioning can improve the supply chain’s collaboration and effectiveness, as well as increase awareness around the end-to-end impacts that decisions or requests might have.

While cross-functional input may seem like a key aspect, only half of employees report using formal networks for such collaboration. This is a missed opportunity that needs to be explored more within supply chains.

3. Enhance efficiency by simplifying workflows

Once employees are engaged and shared objectives are established, leaders can focus on simplifying workflows to unlock efficiencies. This involves identifying and removing bottlenecks, such as redundant approvals or overlapping responsibilities, and standardizing tasks where possible.

At times, despite duplication, the information individuals receive is still incomplete because there is not enough transparency across roles and workflows to know what other teams actually need. Supply chain leaders should review workflows and assess whether tasks are being done in different ways unnecessarily, making it difficult to share resources and develop expertise. If the same task gets done 10 different ways, determine whether or not it can be standardized. If it can, consider if it can be automated entirely.

The goal is to simplify unnecessarily complex or cumbersome work. The answer is not always more resources, process or governance. Instead, consider what a process could look like if the supply chain reinvented it based on the current state and what is needed from it in the easiest way possible.

Fostering organizational simplicity

By improving how work is done, organizations can free up resources and enhance overall effectiveness, supporting teams in achieving more with less. To achieve their organizational goals, it is crucial for leaders to incorporate employee input and think holistically about the impact simplification efforts will have across the organization. Otherwise, they risk increasing rather than reducing work friction and inadvertently creating new problems elsewhere in the organization.

To learn more about change management strategies, join Gartner experts and supply chain leaders at the Gartner Supply Chain Symposium/Xpo in Orlando, FL on May 5-7.

About the author

Lorraine Gavin is an organizational development analyst in the Gartner Supply Chain Practice where she is aligned to the CSCO Enablement Team, supporting chief supply chain officers (CSCOs) and supply chain leaders.

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